For Every Action
by red-tenko
Summary: Pushed back to Earth, Faye finds out two things: Spike is alive, and someone is out to kill her. But that doesn't explain the return of the moon. SXF
1. the past keeps coming

For Every Action  
By Red Tenko  
  
"Of all the times, why now?" Faye demanded to the Red Tail's computer, which was currently telling her half the systems were broken and she was-obviously-going down. A malfunction was one thing, a malfunction on a collision course to Earth was another. She could see it straight ahead, the great blue marble getting bigger as she neared it, and even closer in her path was the ring of moon fragments in orbit.   
  
"If I don't crash into those it'll be the planet," she grumbled to herself. Staring at the display, Faye bitterly noticed that having Jet repair the ship so often had spoiled her from learning to fix anything herself. She couldn't even tell how bad the problem was, but she did know she couldn't fly and that was enough information.   
  
Cursing once, twice, maybe fifty times (but very quickly), Faye slammed her hand down on the communicator. "You're an idiot, you know that?" she growled at the small, black-blue monocraft that had fired on her. The pilot was, she at least assumed, someone she owed money to. "I can't pay you if I'm dead!"   
  
The planet was getting close. The ring was getting closer.   
  
"But fine then, let's make a deal."  
  
~~*earlier*~~  
  
"It's been six hours," Jet announced, speaking for the first time since Spike left the ship. "I guess this means he's not coming back."   
  
Dead. He wouldn't say "dead", and he could feel Faye's eyes on the back of his neck for just that reason.   
  
Faye wouldn't say anything at all.   
She sat in Spike's old chair next to the backlit table, staring out the door and into the blackness of space though the nearest window in view.   
  
She wasn't like Spike, she couldn't just sit still. After the Swordfish vanished in the Martian atmosphere, she'd gone to her room but only stayed for about a half hour and Jet heard her pacing the whole time.   
She then barged into Spike's room. Jet hadn't tried to stop her, and he heard the bumps and clangs as she rifled through the drawers in the bureau, emerging moments later with practically Spike's entire stash of cigarettes.   
It took two packs for Faye to calm down, and now there she was, sitting and staring and dead still save the deck of cards she absently shuffled.   
  
Even then, Jet couldn't bring himself to feel sorry for her. He probably would later, but not right now, not right after the event.   
"Aren't you going to say anything?"   
  
Faye's eyes flicked from the window to Jet, her face looking odd in the Shougi board's neon lighting. She looked at him for a moment, then dropped her gaze to the card deck; taking off the top card, she examined it briefly before letting it drop to the floor.  
The Ace of Spades.  
  
"What's to say?"   
  
~~~**~~~  
When the ship had fired on her, Fay of course dodged the entourage of missiles. She wasn't born yesterday. These missiles, however, seemed to be just that recent. They detonated without contact to the Red Tail, and the explosion had damaged her ship seriously. The technology behind the explosives looked as expensive as the ship, and whoever this person was, Faye could understand why she hadn't paid him. She probably couldn't afford it.   
  
"You don't have my price," said an unfamiliar male voice over her communicator, telling her what she already knew as an answer to her offer.  
  
He fired another set of missiles, although Faye didn't see the use for she was crippled enough already. Without flight control to save her, she quickly emptied one of her oxygen tanks, letting momentum push her out of the weapon's direct path. Once again the missiles exploded anyway, blowing off the Red Tail's landing struts but thankfully nothing more.   
  
But still, one oxygen tank left, and it wasn't as if she could evade like that again without suffocating.   
Dammit! Faye pulled out her mobile comm. and tried to call the Bebop, but found she couldn't get a signal through.   
  
"Who are you anyway?" she demanded to the dark ship's pilot. "Do I owe you something? Or were you a bounty I put away?"  
  
"Neither," said the disembodied voice. "We've never met. Sorry about this, you sound hot, but I'm not getting paid to date you."  
  
Faye would have responded with all sorts of interesting names and phrases she'd picked up over the years, but suddenly her ship began to shake, then violently lurch forward as she caught a glimpse of another missile out the window.   
  
~~*earlier*~~  
  
Five days. Jet sort of expected to hear some news of what had become of the Syndicate by now, but none came, and he really didn't feel like calling up old friends in the ISSP. When Spike left, Jet hadn't expected him to come back, but at the very least he wanted to know if Vicious was dead along with his friend. Not having all the information was something that always bothered Jet.  
  
Another bother, but the usual bother, was Faye. It seemed that now he couldn't decide if he was glad of her company or if he wanted to hurt her. Something about her had changed. It wasn't her personality-no, he was positive the same, brash Faye he'd accepted was in there somewhere-but her actions were different, as if she was taking new personalities out for a test flight.  
  
At first she'd stayed quiet, but in her usual manner of lounging or sleeping. Normally when she got bored she sought someone out to play cards with, but it wasn't until the third quiet day when she showed up in the doorway complaining of the lack of bounties and such and such, offering him a game of poker.  
  
For a moment he thought of agreeing to a game-the bonsai trees weren't helping his mood anyway-but a sudden flash of anger entered him instead. Women were emotional, and Faye was no different, so how could she just act like nothing had happened? She'd practically given him the 21-handgun salute when Spike left, but now it was business as usual? She was being the leech again, using the Bebop's food and water until her money ran out and she needed to find a bounty...  
  
"I don't have the budget to loose to you right now," he told her.  
  
But then again, he hadn't been hunting recently either.   
  
The anger faded as quickly as it had come. Listening to Faye's voice was better than listening to the daylong quiet which had plagued the ship. Although no sweetheart, she wasn't so bad; she just took more getting used to than most people and Jet was almost as used to her as he'd been to Spike. It wasn't as if things had been terribly loud before, but they'd been more active-at least it seemed with four people and a dog on board. This new kind of quiet was eerie, and far too sudden; it would get worse if Faye left.   
He stared at a beat up bonsai tree and inwardly sighed.  
  
"Why don't we play Shougi instead?"   
  
She looked dissatisfied but not disappointed. "Play for what?"  
  
"There's no betting in Shougi." (Author's note: Shougi is Japanese chess)  
  
Faye, pocketing the cards, smiled with her poker face and reminded him, "You can bet on anything."  
  
~~**~~  
  
The turbulence, or whatever that had been, either hit her head or ruptured the oxygen tank. Either way, Faye was dizzy and not in the state of mind to tell which one. All she really knew right now, was that the lights on the console looked very pretty. Lights everywhere...spinning...  
  
She shook her head, but found an unwelcome pain in her neck. She reclined back to her blissful, fuzzy musings and watched the lights. Fragments of glass and metal from her ship floated above her head along with food wrappers. Was she floating too? Zero gravity...how had she gotten out of the seat harness? Must've been a hard knock, but no matter. Why think about that when the lights were so pretty?   
  
And the earth... it was shining all nice and blue and brown and white. She'd never noticed how nice everything was until now, and her home planet... it was close! She reached out to grasp it in her fingers, but found herself looking at the blurry image of her hand, stained in red all the way down her arm. A very nice color, but not a nice sign, she knew, but still couldn't bring herself to do anything about it.   
  
She couldn't tell if she was alive or dead. She couldn't feel a thing-my! There's a thought! Now where had she head that before...  
  
~"I'm not going to die..."~  
  
Oh, that's right.  
  
~"I'm going to see if I'm still alive."~  
  
So what had he been feeling until then-how she felt now? Dizzy but warm, but with a comfortable mix of bright light and shadowy blotches fighting for control of her eyes...  
  
"How many times did you die?" she asked. Faye was unsure who exactly she was asking, but nobody answered. "Is this what it feels like?"   
  
Whatever was happening to her, Faye felt drained of all will to fight it. She was glad she was floating, that chair was too uncomfortable. Everything was too uncomfortable...  
  
It's nice, she decided in that weak sense of mind, to just sit and watch everything. Little droplets of water-red water, coming from somewhere close by-floated alongside an empty cup of instant ramen. Everything looked so wonderful in the glow of the earth. Everything looked so wonderful in the moonlight. All she wanted to do was close her eyes...  
  
Wait.   
  
Moonlight? But the moon was gone, wasn't it?  
~~*earlier*~~  
  
It didn't take Faye long to grasp the basics of Shougi. She seemed to have a talent for picking up games, gambling or otherwise. Her only apparent problem was that she was so new to it, she had yet to figure out how to cheat, and Jet found out she was a very sore looser. But she was persistent, and they ended up playing often although she never won.   
  
Between her fits of frustration however, Jet noticed a bit of skill starting to develop in her game. He half expected her to say something like "I'm picking this up fast, I won't be loosing to you for much longer," but she instead ignored the building talent altogether.   
  
Often she would lie about not understanding the rules as an excuse to take back a bad move she'd made. When those times happened, although Jet knew she'd mastered the basics, he found himself repeating them again and again in a professorial voice.  
  
Thinking back on it, Jet began to wonder if she'd just been humoring him. Normally Faye would never stand to be spoken to like she knew no better, like a child, but she'd been letting him do it anyway and all along wearing that same look she'd given Spike when she couldn't win an argument.   
  
It wasn't exactly like Jet didn't know what people thought his problem was. A control freak-he couldn't help it, he had to do everything himself. He had to feel like he was taking care of someone. Faye knew this, he realized, and had let him rant on and on. She allowed herself to become a minor replacement for Ed, while she satisfied her own want of a certain missing know-it-all to find fault with her.   
  
Once again, Jet couldn't decide between anger or pity towards the woman. He had a feeling that she was acting manageable around him as if she owed it to Spike to keep an old man company. It was degrading, in a way, towards him-but then again it was the only memorial she seemed to be giving to Spike, and the only evidence in her favor in Jet's secret question if she missed him or not. If she was heartless or not.  
  
But there were so many times when he was convinced that Faye's natural womanly tendency to betray people had been thrown onto Spike's memory. She would sit in his old place on the couch, but watch television or read a book, or something that was more "Faye" than "Spike" all the while reclining like the former occupant had in that spot. She'd taken it over, like some kind of territorial animal.   
  
Jet, on his way to the hanger, past her in the living area one afternoon and once again Faye was laying back with her feet up and arms behind her head. A cigarette-one of Spike's last--dangled from her lips and she appeared to be asleep (although Jet doubted it). Somehow, maybe from the way she lay or just because the repressed emotions were finally getting to him, Faye really reminded him of Spike at that moment.   
  
He was filled with a sudden anger, as if she'd been doing something wrong on purpose and right then he wouldn't have considered it out of character. For some reason-any psychiatrist would say depression but Jet would never ask one's opinion-his mood, his emotions, and even his opinions had been going up and down.   
At times, everything she did whether eating or sleeping or saying something sarcastic seemed to be something personally against him. Or Spike. Those were the times when he felt something should be done about the memory of their lost shipmate, but he wouldn't have been a man to express his feelings too far. But for some reason he really hated her right then-no, it was just anger, but a lot of anger.   
  
"What are you doing?" he asked, but his tone was gruff and rather imposing.  
  
She didn't even open her eyes, but replied quickly, "Nothing at all."   
  
"Obviously. You haven't done a thing in a long time."  
  
She shrugged as much as she could with her arms behind her head. "Bounty Hunting is mostly waiting."  
  
Jet stared at the wisps of smoke that curled around above her head and disappeared into the ceiling. The carton the cigarette came from sat on the coffee table next to the ashtray. He knew she still had plenty of her own left, but she seemed determined on finishing off those that Spike had left.  
  
"I thought I could figure it out but I couldn't," Jet conceded in a low voice as he stared at the ashes. "I don't know why, but there's something wrong with you." She half opened her eyes and watched the slow ceiling fan. "There's always been something wrong with you, probably since before you came on board, but it hasn't shown its face until now."  
  
She turned her half open eyes on him, but still said nothing.  
  
"What kind of a woman are you anyway?" he found himself accusing her. "You've always been ungrateful, but for all the times he saved your life you didn't even cry, and that's heartless!"  
  
Faye didn't blink. She inhaled deeply from Spike's cigarette, then extinguished it in the ashtray. "Jet," she said, and he already didn't like the sound of it. Her voice was quiet, and that alone was a red flag from a woman who loves to yell when upset. "Are you angry at me for not grieving," she stood up and plucked the last cigarette from the pack. "or for grieving like a man?"  
  
~~**~~  
It was really there: the moon. It hung in earth's orbit just as it should have, just as Faye remembered it, and that vision alone was enough to pull her from her dream and back to a reality full of pain. Cuts crossed her body in any feasible direction, although she couldn't remember what had caused them exactly.   
  
Some part of her kept reminding her, she'd probably not survive this one. But then again she'd thought that many times, although the last few she'd been unable to save herself and instead he'd rescued her...  
Nobody would come for her this time, but she didn't want to think about that.  
  
So instead all she saw, or all she chose to see, was the moon.   
  
There were so many things wrong with the image. For one thing, technically from her angle Faye should be seeing the dark side of the moon, but it glowed in full. Another obvious problem was that the moon was surrounded by a ring of it's own fragments. Whatever it was, it couldn't be real. Or if it was real in the sense it existed, it was still a fake.  
  
But why?  
  
Faye knew that reasons didn't matter, but she still felt curious. The curiosity was something to focus on over the pain... but maybe that was just it. Maybe she'd lost too much blood, and was now caught up in her own hallucination.  
  
Real or not, there or not, the Red Tail was flying right towards it.   
  
The moon glowed-it glowed so brightly! But everything seemed to be glowing, and Faye tried to warn herself not to go into the light, however inviting it may look. But she didn't have a choice. Flight control was down, and she kept floating closer.   
  
Closer and closer, brighter and brighter, until something seemed to have burned itself out and everything began to turn dark. Earth was gone, the stars were gone, even the inside of her ship had vanished and the bright moon was just a dot growing smaller.  
  
But was it the moon, or she that was fading? Faye was unconscious before she could answer herself.  
  
~~*earlier*~~  
  
Jet regretted loosing his composure like that. He and Faye hadn't exactly avoided each other, but they hadn't talked a lot either. An old friend from the ISSP called up. Since Big Shot's cancellation, finding a decent bounty was harder than usual, and apparently the folks back at the Ganymede station were worried about him.   
  
"We'll give you a tip-can't have you starving you know," detective Asmerik chuckled over the communicator. The Bebop was far out of range so the video connection came out fuzzy. Audio was fine, though, and set loud enough for Faye to hear when she walked in.   
  
"There's a drug dealer recently out," Asmerik continued, "he's broken his parole by starting up again."  
Faye snickered. "For a drug dealer to be caught in this day and age, he has to be pretty bad at his job."  
  
Asmerik apparently heard her. "I'll say," the man laughed. "He's trying to revive the opium industry, even though the modern stuff drove it out of business ages ago."  
  
Jet frowned. "Where's he getting the poppies? I though any place on earth that grew them got panned out by now."  
  
The detective nodded, bobbing his head like a parakeet. "Apparently they grow on Venus as well-which is where he got them that is, not necessarily where he has them now."  
  
Jet nodded too, but without the head bob. He felt sluggish right now, but they needed some money and exercise would do him good. "We'll take it," he conceded without asking Faye, knowing he could throw her debts to him in her face if she wouldn't comply. "What are the specifics?"  
  
"You've only got two days before he's posted on the YMCA list," Asmerik reminded him as the mug shot transmitted. The image of a short, red-haired man only half as muscular as Jet appeared on the screen. Yolan Davis was his name, age unknown but around thirty-five. "You can't see it in the picture, but his prison barcode is on the back of his neck."   
Jet thanked him, and after a bit more small talk disconnected.   
  
"What's the reward?" Faye asked. She had that last cigarette in her mouth, but it was unlit. Jet dimly wondered if she'd smoke it or not.   
  
He crossed his large arms. "The reward is food, fuel, and repairs to the Bebop."  
  
Faye frowned at the though of a bounty so small there'd be nothing left to splurge with. "Does repairs include the water heater?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
"Fine, I'm in." Jet decided to let her have that one instead of pointing out he'd have made her take it anyway. "He couldn't be on Venus now---wouldn't be able to afford any place that could grow a poppy."  
  
Jet reclined back in the chair. He was glad of the bounty now, it made conversation seem more normal. That last real conversation hadn't gone too well at all, but he had to admit it was his own fault for letting his temper get away. Despite that, it was sort of comforting to know that she was, some way, grieving.  
  
That's what he'd been after all along, Jet supposed. A bit of recognition, for Spike's sake. Jet wasn't going to cry, even after a loss, it just wasn't his way. But still, Spike had been a good friend and a generally good man; it felt like somebody should be crying for him, and frankly he'd expected the woman to do what most women did.   
  
"They need a lot of sun, Poppies." Faye continued. "He couldn't grow enough for opium on a ship."  
  
Jet swept his animatronic hand over his bald spot. "I suppose there might be some place left on earth where he could plant a few..." He trailed off as he noticed something about Faye change when he'd mentioned her home planet.  
  
He couldn't put his finger on it, it was like a shadow over her face. But with a shake of her head she shoved whatever feeling it had been away and looked normal, but more distracted than before. As if she was reliving something in her mind.   
  
"I suppose there might be..." she said, referring to the poppies. "Not all of California sunk into the ocean, and I think the poppy was their official flower."  
  
"You can check there, then," Jet instructed.  
  
"Why don't you do it?" she bit back, attitude returning.   
  
Jet grew thoughtful. It seemed that Faye did not want to go to earth, and Jet found himself trying to remember the last time she'd even stepped off the ship and onto that wrecked planet. "The last time you left," he asked slowly, "Where did you go?"  
  
"None of your business."  
  
"It's my business if it effects your ability to catch a bounty."  
  
She sent him a horrible glare, and Jet involuntarily winced. However, somewhere on the inside, he was happy to see a face that could only be described as "classic Faye", a face he hadn't seen in a while.   
  
"Not that you've earned or paid for this information," she growled, standing up. "But I made the stupid decision to go back to my past, thinking I might avoid the usual bad luck about it that seems to contaminate this ship." She held her death-stare to him for another moment or two, then stomped back up the stairs.   
  
It seemed that the Faye who wanted, but was too proud to look for someone to talk to had returned, and this time the dog wasn't there to confide in. She stopped at the circular doorway that leads to the hanger. "I believed him when he said the past didn't matter," she said slowly. "But he was just a lunkhead."  
  
A few minutes later, the Red Tail took off. Judging by the direction, Faye was flying back to earth, but Jet couldn't figure out if it was really the bounty she'd gone after.   
  
~~**~~  
A dog was barking, steadily louder and louder until Faye heard it right above her face. Opening her eyes a little, she looked at the source of the sound. A three headed dog? So she'd arrived at hell....wait... her vision corrected itself and the three heads melded into the face of Einstein himself.  
  
"Welcome back, Faye-Faye!" a familiar voice sang. "Welcome! Welcome!"   
  
Edward ran over to where she lay and stuck her face so close that her hair tickled Faye's forehead. "Has Faye-Faye come back?" asked the child sort of worriedly as she balanced on her heels.   
  
"Ed..." Faye found her voice was nearly gone, her throat was so dry. "Uggh.. do you have any water?" she asked, in to much pain to bother with the pleasantries of "hello" and "how are you" and "Move already".   
  
Ed pulled out a canteen and began to dump the water on Faye's face. She sat up quickly, only then realizing how many bruises she had, and grabbed the bottle before the girl could empty it all. She drank what was left, and only afterward did she feel good enough to be grateful.   
  
She was sitting in the shade of an overhang on a rock structure. The sound of the sea came from somewhere near by, but the ground on which she sat felt dry as a desert. She looked around and noticed the Red Tail, sideways in the sand. It looked generally in one piece but she couldn't tell if it would fly until she checked it herself.   
  
Edward and Ein stared at her with matching expressions, as if they expected her to do something. Faye looked around again and saw no sign of the father Ed had gone to find. "How'd I get here," she asked, starting to feel suspicious for some reason. "And how long have I been asleep?"  
  
"Ed brought you," said Ed, pointing to a face stretched out like her computer icon. "Three days ago Ed did."  
  
"Three days..." Faye repeated, lifting a hand to her forehead. She had a slight fever, which wasn't surprising for she doubted Ed knew how to treat her. It was lucky she'd woken when she did, for she wouldn't have survived much longer without water.  
  
"How did you bring me, Ed?" she asked. Most of her didn't care about the how, just as long as she was alive, but right now she felt like hearing the girl's voice.   
  
"Ed flew Faye-Faye's ship," the kid announced proudly, holding up her special remote control. "Not a big crash, Ed is getting better."   
  
Faye felt herself smile. "Yeah..." Who ever had fired on her hadn't come after her in the three days, so she was probably safe. Probably.  
  
"Faye-Faye?"   
  
"What?"  
  
"The Bebop isn't here yet." Edward looked rather disappointed. Faye began to wonder what kind of sense of family this girl really had. Ein whined in his doglike way.  
  
"Jet doesn't know I'm here."  
  
Ed crossed her arms and legs and began to sway like a daruma doll, staring upward as if watching for a ship. "Does Spike-person know where Faye-Faye is?"  
  
Faye felt her throat contract. She was thirsty again. The kid didn't know... "Ed..." she started, but didn't know how to finish. Did this child-this very smart but very odd child-even understand what death was? "Ed..." she tried again, wondering how she could word such news.  
  
Unable to think, she crawled out from under the overhang and paced in the hot sun. It probably wasn't the healthiest thing she could do, but she needed to get her blood circulating. "Ed, here's the thing," she began, putting her hands behind her head and looking up at the sky. "Spike is-what the hell?!"  
  
There, straight above her in the glare of the afternoon sun, was the moon. So it hadn't been a dream... "Ed!" she shouted. "What is that?"  
  
Ed smiled, hopped up, and ran sideways to her computer chanting, "Something in the sky, something in the sky," she flipped over and typed with her toes, "not a cloud, not a ship, what is it indeed?" Returning to a semi-normal sitting position Ed fixed her goggles over her eyes and pointed upward. "Moon came back. When Faye-Faye did. Tomato doesn't tell Ed it is there."  
  
Faye didn't know what to think of it, but she did know she really needed a cigarette.   
  
A ship flew quickly overhead, leaving a white trail of smoke in the sky. "Spike-person?" asked Ed.  
  
Sighing, Faye reminded herself to take one step at a time, but she'd lost the energy to put things lightly. "Ed, Spike died a couple weeks ago."  
  
Edward made a buzzing sound. "Wrong!"  
  
"Ed!" she tried, finding herself saying things she'd screamed about if someone said them to her. "I know it's hard to accept but it's true!"  
"Wrong, wrong," The girl chanted, doing another flip and typing with her toes again. "Tomato says so."  
  
Faye felt more tired than ever, and she walked over to the computer to take a look at Ed's findings. The Young Man's Cowboy Association website was on the screen, and it looked like Radical Edward had hacked the system. "Spike-person is here!" said Ed, pointing to the screen.  
  
Pushing the child out of the way, and suddenly feeling very cold, Faye stared at "Tomato" with an obvious degree of shock. The screen displayed a record of dates and times each registered Cowboy and Cowgirl had turned in a bounty, and for what amount.   
  
And there was Spike Spiegel's name, still active on the server. According to this information, he'd turned in a bounty on Mars the day before yesterday.   
  
Spike was alive.  
  
To be continued  
  
Authors note- hey, I'll make this quick since this chapter was already long enough. I hoped you liked it, I know the scenes on the Bebop were kind of strange, but I tried to make them as realistic as possible. I think I did a good job too, because I based it on my own actions and observations of behavior during a family tragedy. (oh and I hope the flashbacks weren't too confusing)  
Anywho, this chapter was to set things up and the plot will pick up from here. Hope you like what I have so far and please review! 


	2. bitter yellow flowers

Chapter 2  
  
Tracking the drug dealer was a lot harder without Ed, but in the end, the usual method of asking street goers and showing pictures led Jet to Bestow, one of the smaller Venusian floating colonies but the largest producer of the disease causing spores. The rock was really one big botanical garden surrounded by little villages of vacation cottages for the overstressed financial tycoon.   
  
For the first time since the incident, Jet was positive people were staring at his clothes rather than his arm. Everyone around him was either a socialite or someone from the upper middle class that ran the tourist attractions. He stuck out like the Bebop in a yachting dock.   
  
The tourist bureau told him nothing he needed to know. There were, in fact, poppies growing in the botanical garden but they weren't the right kind to make narcotics. Still, not ready to give up, Jet headed out to check the flower shops.  
~~~  
"What's wrong, Faye-Faye?" asked Ed, staring intently at her. Ein gave a whine.   
  
Faye knelt in front of "Tomato", staring at the screen and Spike's name on it. From Edward's point of view, Faye-Faye was staring so hard she could make the screen explode by glaring at it the way she was, looking all grave and serious.   
  
Ed leaned over and stuck her nose close to Faye's so they could see eye to eye in a literal sense. "Nya?" she made a sound offering her concern.   
  
With so much on her mind right now, the last thing Faye needed was the child breaking her concentration. "Poppies," she heard herself say and decided to go along with it. Might as well give the kid a job to do while she assessed the situation. "I'm trying to find a bounty whose growing poppies, Ed," she told the girl, putting on her poker face to hide her discontentment. "See if you can find a place on this planet where someone can grow a lot."  
  
Ed beamed and gave her a backwards salute. Faye moved aside and allowed Radical Edward to crawl back to her computer on all fours, chanting "poppies, floppies, copies" while she accessed the search engine.   
  
With the kid sufficiently distracted, Faye headed over to the beaten Red Tail. Although the craft was on its side, she climbed in and leaned against the pilots chair as best she could. Sideways. That's how everything seemed to be right now—not upside down, but getting there.   
  
Surprisingly enough, the assassin went to the back burner of her mind. She wasn't surprised at all to know someone wanted her dead. She tended to, after all, leave a long trail of enemies as she went along her unmerry way. Still, marooned on Earth wasn't the best to be nor the best place to hide, and although she wasn't scared, the thought did agitate her.  
  
The moon disturbed her; there was no running around that thought. That final image of the white orb, seconds before the accident that ruined her, was freshest out of all her memories. Faye hadn't wanted to see that thing again, let along begin thinking of an explanation for its reappearance.   
  
And Spike… Now let's think about this rationally—the hell with that, what kind of a bastard was he!? Alive. He'd been alive these past weeks, and if he was capable of bringing in a bounty he most certainly was capable of calling! So why hadn't he?   
  
Even if he'd intended to leave the Bebop, he should have at least had the decency to tell them so. He could've at least written for his belongings. He could've at least asked the ISSP officers at the YMCA post to tell Jet he was all right. He could've at least done something…anything…   
  
It seemed like the wall she'd erected when he'd left had finally crashed under the full weight of the hell she'd been through. She still didn't know why she'd been so depressed about him. They hadn't been close—but then again they'd been connected.  
  
They had, whether by purpose or on accident, found out each other's secrets. She'd found out about Vicious--although their situation still confused her--and about Julia. Spike had eavesdropped on her, opened her mail, and ended up knowing more about her than she'd have consciously shared. But in the end, where had that gotten them? They'd both had too many problems to worry about the other's, and yet in the end… in the end….  
  
Faye needed a cigarette. What she really wanted was beer; something she could feel killing her brain cells so she wouldn't have to think any more. She didn't have any alcohol so she settled for satisfying the first craving. Taking a cigarette out of her jacket pocket, she placed it between her lips, lit it, and tried to loose her troubles in the relaxing smoke.   
  
A whine from Einstein interrupted her long deserved peaceful moment. Faye looked down into the face of the corgi, and he stared back with an anxious expression one wouldn't expect on a dog. She glared at him for a moment, feeling like the mutt had her on trial all of a sudden.   
  
She found herself staring at the smoking cigarette between her fingers. It was her last, or rather, the last of Spike's that she'd taken. She couldn't remember why she'd stolen his stash, or what her thoughts were at the time. Faye just assumed she'd been angry at him for his idiotic, testosterone driven suicide and wanted a little revenge. Now it just felt wrong.   
Still, it was the last one and she'd left without her own pack. She set the cigarette back between her lips and slowly smoked the rest of it before extinguishing the butt on the side of the Red Tail.   
  
"Come on, Ed," she shouted, grabbing the girl by the collar and dragging her in the direction of the ocean. "We need to find a transport off this rock."  
  
Edward made one of her confused sounds and Ein trotted behind them, barking happily. "Where going to?" asked Ed.   
  
"Mars."  
  
"Faye-Faye is not going after bounty?"  
  
"I can't right now, I'm out of cigarettes."  
~~~~  
Jet ended up at a little shop near the edge of the colony, settled in a busy shopping district full of places that sold various souvenirs but nothing of real use. It didn't have a name as much as a label, with a sign saying "Classic Oriental Flower Arrangement" over a green painted door.   
  
There were no customers in the place, and the windows were so full of flower displays that the miniature jungle blocked off light to the rest of the room. But despite the dimness, the girl at the cash resister wore tinted glasses. She stared at Jet over the rim of them as he walked to the counter.  
  
"Excuse me," he began, pulling out the mug shot of Yolan Davis, the opium dealer and latest target. "Has this man been in your store?"  
  
The girl stared at him without expression for a moment, then leaned over to look at the photo. "Yeah…" she replied slowly. "Came in last week. Bought daises."   
  
"Daises?" Jet reiterated.   
  
She shrugged and settled back to her stool, picking up the paper she'd been reading before his interruption. "Well I don't know; it was some kind of yellow flower."   
  
Jet noted that this girl didn't talk like the rest of the people he'd run into in Venus's upper circle. She seemed unconcerned with how bored she sounded, no matter if it was impolite or not. She talked normally, like the people he was used to, and Jet figured she probably hadn't grown up in the colonies. She probably wasn't even from Venus, judging by the turtleneck shirt she wore on a planet notoriously hot and humid.  
  
"Are there any sales records you can check?" he asked her, eyeing the antique register and wondering if it did anything actually useful.   
  
She shook her head. "Paid cash, I remember that," she told him, then lowered her newspaper a little as she recollected. "In fact, he bought out our stock of those flowers plus a bunch of seeds. Don't know how he afforded it though—dressed like a hobo."  
  
Jet scratched the side of his head. This was the best lead so far, and obviously the source of the poppies, but he didn't want to stay on Venus any longer than he had to. "Is there any record of the receipt? I need to know what he bought exactly."  
  
The girl set down her paper and smirked, reminding Jet of the face Faye made when she won a hand of cards. "That's mighty nosy of you, Cowboy," she said, then picked up the paper once more, previous expression returning to her face. "And a mighty inconvenience. Not only are our records off limits to the public, they're filed by yours truly and therefore a complete mess."  
  
"I'd of course compensate you for your trouble," Jet pressed, hoping a teenager wouldn't ask for too much.  
  
She laughed a little, not looking up. "This is Venus, Mr. Lone Ranger. Bribes are a small bounty." She smiled to herself and put all her attention to her newspaper, dismissing Jet altogether. But when she turned the page, her mouth dropped open and her eyes were—probably, he couldn't really see—wide behind the shades. "But maybe there is something you could pay me with.."   
  
Jet arched an eyebrow, skeptical about this girl's sudden change of heart. "What's that?" he asked carefully, moving over to the counter to try and peek at newspaper article she'd reacted to.   
  
The girl quickly folded the paper and, taking off her glasses, shot him a glare. But as soon as she achieved eye contact, Jet felt strange, almost sick to his stomach and light headed. A smoky fragrance he hadn't noticed before filled the air like old, bitter perfume, and he found himself unable to blink or look away from the child's eyes.   
  
Something was definitely wrong with this girl.   
  
She continued to stare at him, though him, for several seconds before finally dropping her eyes back to the paper. Instantly Jet felt normal again, and could hardly recall that strange sensation he'd just experienced.   
  
Something must have happened to change her mind, for she unfolded the newspaper and set it down so he could see the article. There was what Jet first thought to be an old picture of the earth and its moon, before the Gate accident, but at closer inspection it seemed he was mistaken. This photo was very recent, for the fragment ring around the earth was unmistakable. Also unmistakable, was the pearly-gray moon floating before its planet.  
  
"I need to get to Earth," said the cashier girl. "Quickly. You have a ship, right? I have information." She smiled at him, kind of aggressively. "I find an exchange of favors much better than currency."  
  
Jet sighed. Transport her to earth? That would probably work out since it was his next stop anyway. It wouldn't really be much trouble to take on another passenger and it would give him the information he needed. Besides, it wasn't like he was adding another moocher to the crew, for her destination seemed rather final.   
"All right," he conceded. "Tell me what you know about opium."  
  
~~~~  
  
Finding a transport to Mars was easy, getting to port to reach it was next to impossible. Faye didn't want to just abandon the Red Tail, even though it was now unflyable it was still the one thing she owned and didn't owe money on.   
  
Taking out her communicator, she tried the number of one of Spike's mechanic friends. Once again, the comm. wouldn't dial or make any kind of connection to the local communication system. What was wrong with this thing? Perhaps it had been damaged in the bumpy flight, although it didn't look dented in the least.  
  
She ended up getting Ed to send a request for tow by email, but when they'd waited a half-hour for a reply, things began to go wrong.   
  
It started with the sound of a ship flying overhead, which Faye had ignored and Ed looked sadly at. Ein was barking like crazy. Minutes later, they heard the ship again, flying much lower this time.  
  
"Spike-person!" Ed cried, pointing up. Ein continued to bark, then grabbed Faye's shoe in his mouth and tried to pull her in the Red Tail's direction.   
  
She looked up to see that Edward was very much mistaken. The ship wasn't the Swordfish II, but the same dark blue monocraft that shot her from the sky.   
  
Faye quickly looked left and right, searching for something to inspire some genius method of escape. Rocks, sand, dog, Red Tail, Ed—Ed would have to do. "Where's that remote of yours!?" she demanded, running over and grabbing the kid's shirt. "You have to crash that ship or fly it away or something!"  
  
"Aye!" Ed chirped, wriggling out of Faye's grasp and scurrying to her pile of mechanics. She retrieved the remote, and tumbled on her back with her legs and feet in the air. "Fly away! Fly away!" she aimed the remote at the ship and twisted about in various directions on the sand.  
  
But the ship was holding its course, circling low and coming in for a landing.  
  
"What's wrong?" Faye demanded, searching her jacket for her gun but finding it missing. It must have fallen out in the crash. She ran to the Red Tail, climbing in the cockpit and searching underneath the seat for her weapon. It would be her only chance if—"What the--!?" she was flipping over.  
  
The Red Tail now stood right side up again, though some feat of engineering when the engines started of their own accord—no—of Ed's accord. When Faye regained her sense of equilibrium she saw Edward standing nearby, pointing the remote control at her ship.   
  
"Is not broken!" Ed announced cheerily, referring to her remote. "Ed needs a minute to connect to blue ship." She fluttered over to "Tomato" and began to work. "Blue is behind a firewall! Password…password…"  
Faye watched the oblivious girl typing madly as the dark ship hovered in the air a few yards away, extended its landing struts and settled down in the sand. Out of time.   
  
Still unable to locate her gun, she rushed foreword and scooped up Ed and "Tomato" under her arms and made a beeline for the Red Tail, Ein at her heels.   
~~~~~  
Most people wouldn't trust a cowboy. Making a deal with one would only benefit you half the time, depending on what the Bounty Hunter got out of it and if he was willing to pay. Another person would've waited until they'd reached earth to give Jet the information he'd asked for, but either this girl was especially trusting or she knew that he had at least some morals.   
  
Margaret was her first name, and she refused to mention her last. Jet had assumed her to be around seventeen, sixteen at the youngest, but as it turned out she was fourteen and tall for her age (not to mention that superior look she had which added years to her appearance). She was smart, and knew not only about the flowers she sold but what a person could do with them.  
  
"Opium comes from the Opium Poppy," she explained. "It was pretty popular around the nineteenth and very early twentieth century, but people tended to think pot and other things were more fun—not as bitter you know--and the business pretty much went under. It can kill you pretty easily, and it's extremely addictive." She frowned. "Most people wouldn't think about starting that kind of a business. I mean, there are plenty of drugs you can grow in an alley or a closet, but poppies need to be right out in the open sunlight and they're needs to be a lot to produce anything—not to mention it's the type of flower you got to replant every year. It's got a distinct smell, which is a dead giveaway if you know it. It's not too easy to hide. Yolan is an idiot for trying; too much trouble if you ask me."  
  
Jet nodded and inhaled deeply from his cigarette. He knew he was addicted to nicotine, just like Faye was and Spike had been, just like nearly every officer on the force, just like nearly every bounty hunter in the solar system. Somehow, after hearing about opium, the tobacco tasted better.  
  
"What do you know about Yolan Davis?" he asked her again, now that she seemed to be in the mood to share.   
  
Margaret, sitting on the counter, rested her chin on her hands and smirked. "I told you about opium like you asked," she reminded him. "Extra information means an extra favor."  
  
Jet sighed. Should've known. Just like a female to be so greedy. "What else is it you want?"   
  
She reached out and tapped his false arm, creating a hallow sounding 'pang'. "If that were to break," she asked, "could you repair it? What I mean to ask is how much do you know about cybernetics?"   
  
Jet blinked. Odd question from an odd girl. He would have preferred to keep his arm out of their discourse, but a bit of curiosity forced him to overlook that. "I know enough to handle it."  
  
Margaret scratched the back of her neck while continuing to stare at his shoulder. "Would you be able to disconnect the mechanics without hurting the skin?"  
  
Frowning, Jet extinguished his cigarette. This was a bad conversation. "I could, but I wouldn't."  
  
"Course not. Didn't ask you to," Margaret snapped back, apparently insulted at the insinuation. "What I mean is," she reached up to her turtleneck shirt and pulled down the collar a ways. "Could you disconnect this?"  
  
Coiled around her neck was some kind of device. It looked like a dog collar made from the same metal as Jet's arm, but darker in color and full of ports for wires to plug in to.   
  
"What is that?" he asked, not sure what to make of it.  
  
Her face looked plain but grave, and her stare was icy. Jet wished she'd put those glasses back on, he hated those eyes. "It's a guarantee that I stay right here," she said, tapping the choker. "Until I'm not needed anymore."  
  
~~~~~~  
Spike Spiegel walked through the dusty Martian streets, leaning foreword with his hands in his pockets, demeanor unchanged. Anyone looking wouldn't think twice about him, for he appeared light on his feet and unchallenged by the weight of the solar system.  
  
In reality, Spike had much on his mind. But for almost three weeks now he'd been without a real place to sit back and order his thoughts. For the first time in a long time, maybe the first time ever, he didn't know what to do next.   
  
Turning off the side streets and onto the main road, he began to observe a change in pedestrian traffic. People of all sorts were heading in the same direction he was, up the street and into the center of town. Venders were leaving their stands and grubby looking children raced each other.   
  
Spike kept his pace, curious but not enough so to produce any enthusiasm. When he made it to the source of all the commotion, a ring of people surrounded whatever it was so he still couldn't see. But the gossip trial was enough.  
"Crashed right into the courtyard—luckily she didn't hit any buildings."  
  
"I heard there was a kid inside, but he ran off right away."  
  
"Her child?"  
  
"Couldn't have been, she's too young."  
  
"Did someone call an ambulance?"  
  
"I know it was a rough landing but how does a ship get ~this~ beaten up?"  
  
"My, how horrible…"  
  
"Does anyone know first aid?"  
  
"Is she alive?"  
  
"I can't tell."  
Spike stared at the crowd of onlookers in disapproval before continuing on his way. He didn't see much more than a few thin wisps of smoke; the rest of whatever accident had occurred was obscured by the spectators. Most of them didn't have any real concern for the victim, but merely wanted to see something interesting. It was kind of a sick thought, but who was he to judge?  
  
Although he had no interest in staring at some pike of wreckage he had just as little interest in the causalities. Bad luck goes all around, that's the way of the universe. Spike lit a cigarette.   
  
"Five..."  
  
He couldn't bring himself to feel sympathy after all he'd been through. It was too much to think about, and he didn't want to start trying.  
  
"Four…"  
  
He'd thought he'd finally taken a step—maybe not foreward or backward, but at least in some direction. But then the road got blasted out in front of him, or rather blasted out of the sky.  
  
"Three…"  
  
Spike had woken up to very bad news, and now he was back to the place he'd been at the lowest point in his life, when he'd escaped from the Syndicate. Alone.   
  
"Two…"  
  
It seemed that his life had already gone the circle, and yet he'd barely started living it (if you could call what he did living). He'd figured out what he wanted. He'd even taken measures so he could grasp that very small goal, but then…  
  
"ONE!" arms suddenly grasped around his neck, and Spike had to bend far backwards to avoid choking from his small assailant. He would have flipped the person, had he not heard that familiar voice. "FOUND HIM! FOUND HIM! SPIKE-PERSON IS HERE!"   
  
He quickly turned around to find a beaming Edward still dangling from his neck. "ED!" he had to admit, this was the first welcome surprise he'd had in a while. Even if the kid had annoyed him, he was still—secretly—relieved to find her just the same. "What are you doing here?" he asked, detangling the girl's arms and setting her on the ground.   
  
From next to her heels, Einstein barked in hopes of some acknowledgement. Pushing the goggles away from her eyes and back to the top of her head, she explained in as clear a way as she was capable. "Ed flew here. Faye-Faye said go to Mars."  
  
"Faye!?" he repeated. That couldn't be right, Faye was… but maybe that guy had been wrong and—no—this was Ed here. The kid wouldn't know how to navigate a Gate; she'd probably taken weeks to get here. "Ed," he said, putting his hands on the kid's shoulders and trying to get her to pay attention. "How did you fly here? Why did Faye tell you to come?"  
  
Ed 'nya'd and pointed up at the sky. "Ed flew the Red Tail," she said. She then reached out and plucked the cigarette from his mouth. "Faye-Faye wanted these."  
  
"How did you get the Red Tail?"  
  
"Faye-Faye brought it. Tail won't fly, Ed had to make it."  
  
"Where is it now?"  
  
"With Faye-Faye."   
  
Spike stared at Ed for a moment in silence. This kid got mixed up quite a lot, but she wasn't a liar. Maybe Faye really was alive "Where is Faye?" he asked cautiously.  
  
Ed, looking confused by the faces he was making, lifted a rubbery arm and pointed at the crash site.   
To be continued  
  
Hey all, it's the author again just letting you know I'm about to have an ulcer. Man! A note to all you aspiring authors out there, you don't know stress until you've started something you have no idea how to finish. Yes folks, I'm pretty much making this up as I go along.   
But enough about that, ooo fun chapter eh? I thought so. More action, less angst, but fans of that deep though stuff will have chapter three to look foreword to so there's something for everyone! Wondering why Spike thought Faye was dead? Well don't worry, I have at least that explanation ready for the next chapter.   
Hmm I started plot building. I know the Jet scenes were kind of boring but they come in handy for the, you know, plot that you'll be seeing unravel. (oh and a note: I don't actually know much about opium beyond that it comes from poppies. Yes all you Wizard of Oz fans, in that poppy scene, Dorothy was high! Man, that sorta smudges a whole raft of fond childhood memories… hmm…)   
  
Heh, I better stop typing before I do that annoying thing I do so well. Please review! I have no life so it's my only motivation. (like the guilt trip there? Fun stuff, heheh, but seriously feedback is unbelievingly appreciated!.) 


	3. an endangered species

Chapter 3  
  
Author: oy, did I actually attempt a cliffhanger on the last chapter? O.o eh… that was unintended. It felt like things would get too long if I finished it up like I wanted to… tired… needed sleep…school night… zzzzzzzzzzzzz….  
Just a small note of apology on the format of chapter 2 which is just a tad, uh., screwed.  
The computer went bust and we had to reinstall everything, and we ended up "upgrading" our Microsoft word. And of course by upgrade I mean slaughtering, because apparently being new and improved REALLY means being a bigger pain in the—  
Buuuuut this fanfic isn't my personal soap box so I'll just start ^^;;;  
~~~  
  
Chapter 3  
The small crowd around battered Red Tail wouldn't let him though. Spike took out his gun and shot a few blanks into the air, which scared most of them away and compelled those remaining to give him space.   
  
Prying the hatch open the rest of the way, he climbed into the cockpit. Faye was there, just like the kid said. She lay sprawled back over the seat, partially tangled in the restraints and very still. Spike felt a surprisingly strong rush of relief to see that she was breathing, and doing so normally which was a good sign.   
  
Scratches covered her arms and legs, all of them recent but only a few looked fresh. Ed had crawled out of the wreck unharmed, which probably meant it hadn't been so bad a landing, but then again Ed had been electrocuted without injury so her durability was a factor.   
"Ed," he called back to the girl looking over his shoulder. "Did you see if she hit her head?" he asked, reaching out and tapping Faye's cheek with no reaction. Her skin was dry and off color, except for a slight flush on her cheeks. He slipped his fingers to the side of her neck and found her pulse steady but uncomfortably weak.   
  
Edward vigorously shook her head. "No, Faye-Faye fell asleep in the Gate."  
  
Spike raised an eyebrow. "She fell asleep," he reiterated. "Leaving you to fly the ship?"  
  
Ed nodded.  
  
"And she didn't wake up when you were crashing?"  
  
"Faye-Faye was tired," Ed explained as if defending Faye. "Slept for three days on earth," she pointed proudly to herself with one hand and to the dog with the other. "Ed and Ein took good care of Faye-Faye."  
  
He stared at the odd pair for a moment, letting that sink in. Ed the nurse, Ed the pilot, good thing the dog had been there to keep Faye alive. He tried to take the sleeping explanation and figure out what that meant to Ed. Looking at Faye's bruised condition, Spike could only assume that Ed meant Faye'd been unconscious even before hitting the ground. Perhaps she'd gotten injured escaping the Bebop.  
  
"H-Hey, you shouldn't move her," the voice of a nervous sounding man warned him. Spike turned around to see one of the rubbernecker spectators, voicing concern and acting like he cared. How could a stranger really care? Strangers never knew better. "If she hit her head—"  
  
"I don't think she has," Spike cut him off, slipping his hand behind Faye's head; he checked for a bump but found none.   
  
The man behind him still looked over his shoulder. "You should wait for the ambulance, it'll get here soon, and—" This time Ed cut him off. She hopped off the ship's bent wing with a "roar" and landed on all fours in front of the guy, growling and bearing her teeth. Sufficiently confused, he retreated back to the small audience which had backed away quite a few more feet.   
  
The sound of Faye's breathing had changed and she made a noise, nearly at the surface of consciousness. The debris that covered the inside of the pilot's seat kept Spike from sitting her up all the way, but he did his best to give her head support and once again tapped her on the cheek. Her face scrunched up and she looked more like she did before her morning coffee than an accident victim.  
  
"Faye, wake up," Spike demanded in a low voice, leaning over and poking her face a third time. "Stubborn woman, you don't know what's good for you," he muttered to himself, but she seemed to have heard the comment for he was nearly positive he heard her murmur "idiot" before a final groan and her eyes fluttering open.   
  
Spike gave her his usual grin. "Finally woke up, did you? So lazy."  
  
Eyes only half open, Faye stared at him for a moment with a look he'd seen before. But then she made an attempt at a short laugh and a small smirk. "So the Lunkhead finally shows his face?" she scoffed. Her voice was hoarse. "Just like a man to be late."  
  
"Just like a woman to show up unannounced," Spike countered quickly.  
  
Faye laughed, or tried to once again. It seemed to tire her so she settled for her usual smile. "That was terrible," she said with the old ring in her weak voice. "If you're going to try and pick a fight, at least insult me like you mean it." She closed her eyes and for a moment Spike thought she'd fallen asleep again but she continued. "Witty enough I suppose, but your heart wasn't in it. If I didn't know better I'd think you're glad to see me."  
  
Before he could respond, the sirens of the ambulance began to cut through the street sounds; Faye's eyes flashed open with the agitated look she tended to get when nervous. "Is that for me? I gotta get out of—uggh," she tried to stand but didn't even make it to sitting up straight before slipping back down.   
  
"What, don't tell me you're thinking about hospital bills!" Spike couldn't believe this woman! She wasn't seriously hurt, but she obviously had a concussion and those—when left untreated—could cause brain damage. A broken bone he could handle himself but he was no neurosurgeon. She continued her struggle to rise, but he set his hands firmly on her shoulders and tried to hold her still.   
  
"No!" she protested, shaking her head too quickly for the dizziness already setting in. "You don't understand," she tried to get up again but didn't even make it further than the first try before slumping back in the seat, out of breath. "I can't be put on the hospital register—he'll find me."  
  
Spike frowned, skeptical about her motives. Faye didn't usually run away from things, but then again she wasn't one to pull a Spiegel and try to fight while injured. "Who?"  
  
Faye shook her head again, slower and more carefully this time. "I don't know, some guy—in this blue ship." She paused for breath. "He's trying to kill me. I don't remember getting to the Gate but he may have followed us in."  
  
Glaring at her for a second, he wondered how she could try such a risk. He'd have said something if he didn't know she'd throw all his reckless endeavors in his face. Sighing, Spike finally conceded. He almost took his hands off her arms but it seemed that she now needed the support to keep herself up. The ambulance was getting closer—heeded only somewhat by the pedestrian traffic that didn't want to move. There really wasn't time for an argument if she was telling the truth.   
  
"Fine, it's your body." Spike slung his arms under her knees and torso and pulled her out of the pilot's chair as best he could. He then set her down on the nose of the Red Tail and turned his back toward her. "Here, piggyback," he ordered.  
  
Faye mumbled something like 'what are we, ten?' but climbed on anyway, wrapping her arms around Spike's shoulders. Her body slumped completely as she blacked out, making things pretty difficult but he managed. As soon as he had her balanced, he set off back down the street heading for the edge of town.   
  
Edward and Einstein trotted behind them, the former demanding a horsey ride 'if Faye-Faye gets one'. Those people who'd been looking at the accident watched them go, such a strange procession. Nobody seemed to have anything to say about the matter when the paramedics arrived, but they continued to stare for a moment more, then the crowd dissipated and they returned to their business.  
  
~~  
  
It took Jet a half an hour just to break the locking mechanism on the 'monitor' around Margaret's neck. Scratching the part of his head with a little hair left, he squinted at the machine wondering what to do next. "Look, kid, I don't know what this thing is," he told her. She didn't look surprised. "But from what I can see it's attached to the nerve bundle at the top of your spine. I can't remove this without damaging your brain, you'd be better off with a professional."  
  
Her back facing Jet so he could see the monitor better, but he could almost feel her frown penetrate the pollen-scented air. "I suppose that doesn't matter anyway," she replied after a moment. "Just disconnect the locator."  
  
"The locater?"  
  
She rolled her eyes and turned back to face him, thankfully with those rose tinted glasses back on. "Well I don't know the real name for it," she snapped. "It's that thing on the back—the port that juts out a little. There's some kind of field around this building that interacts with the collar. If I go through it, the locater activates and I go into seizure."  
  
Jet couldn't help but stare at her in surprise. So this girl was some sort of hostage? He frankly would have preferred the usual hostage situation where you get the person away from the guy with the gun and there was really no thinking and tool belts involved. But as he considered just leaving—for of course the kid couldn't follow—that part of Jet's mind which had attached itself to Edward awoke and told him 'this kid might come in handy'.   
  
"What's the locater look like?" he asked, feeling defeated by his own parental sense of responsibility.   
  
"I dunno, it's on the back of my neck so I haven't exactly seen it." Margaret trotted over to the counter and leaned over the edge, rising back up with a laptop computer in her hands. She turned it on and took a small cable, not unlike those used in video game consoles, and plugged one end to the computer—the other end into the monitor, at a port on the right side of her neck. "Let's find out."   
  
Almost instantly, a display of the collar's schematics appeared on the screen. Sufficient data must have been unavailable, for the diagram showed only the outer frame and nothing about the inner computer that had attached itself to her brain.   
But the information on the 'locater' was there, and Jet had it off in generally no time at all.   
  
Soon enough, Jet could hear her footsteps moving all over the back room as she got her things together. While she packed, Jet picked up the paper and turned it to the infamous article showing a picture of the moon.  
  
The first thing Jet observed about the article was that the paper it was printed in—The Martian Chronicle—was an infamous supermarket tabloid known for its trash. The second thing he observed was the complete outrageousness of the article.   
  
According to the Chronicle, the moon—THE moon—had reappeared next to earth. It went on to say that the "moon" hadn't just been to earth, in fact, the earth was its latest stop in what seemed to be a random tour of the solar system from Venus to Saturn to who knew next. The "reporter" claimed it to be a sign from aliens wanting humans to stop using the Gates.  
  
It was crap. Pure, utter crap—and not just the part about aliens--Jet was sure. Granted, he hadn't paid much attention to the news since Spike's departure, but he was positive he would have heard about something like the return of the moon.   
  
How could that Margaret girl believe such idiocy? It seemed to Jet her reason for wanting passage to earth, whatever that reason was, had been inspired by the article. But then again, she didn't seem to have read the segment, but looked at the picture.  
  
But even the photo looked pretty cut-and-paste to him. For one thing, the angle was all wrong. The moon would be shadowed from the camera's position but it glowed all the way, and far too brightly.   
  
"Ready to go?" Margaret interrupted his thoughts. She closed and locked the storage room door behind her and, toting a bulky shoulder bag, walked to the counter to the cash register.   
  
"I've been waiting for you." Jet turned away from the newspaper and leaned against the counter, crossing his arms.   
  
She pushed her sunglasses securely to the bridge of her nose as she pocketed the rest of the woolongs from the inventory. The register closed with an old-fashioned 'ting' and she seemed ready to leave.   
  
"Shame," Margaret muttered when they'd left the flower shop. "With nobody to water them, those flowers'll die." Jet, thinking about his unattended bonsai, nodded and led the way to the Bebop at a quick-paced walk.   
~~~  
  
A soft breeze came in from somewhere to her left. She was on the ground, apparently, or a very hard mattress. There was a draft, not a bad one really, it seemed to cool the place down.   
  
Faye, not daring to open her eyes, lay in silence for many long seconds taking in the room with her other senses. The air was scented, like something sweeter than tobacco (although she could smell that too). Moving her fingers she felt the rough fabric of her blanket, and realized that she must have been really tired to feel so comfortable—especially with that rock digging into her back. Where was this place anyway?  
  
~~"Where are you taking me?"~~  
  
~~"Would you believe me if I said a medicine man?"~~   
  
Some part inside her laughed. Faye had thought it was just part of a dream but when she opened her eyes--sure enough, there above her was the pointed top of a tepee and its cloth walls.   
  
She turned her head to the side to look around. The tent was small, and crowded with all sorts of things from ancient relics to video games. A young, bronzed skinned man sat by a darker fold in the tarp. He appeared to be dozing. A small, old Indian sat near the back where the air from outside came in on him. He didn't seem to be awake, but his eyes were so infolded in wrinkles she couldn't tell. He might've been watching the sand pile in his hand steadily grow smaller as the grains trickled through his fingers.  
  
"You must keep your eyes open from now on, Sleeping Wolf."   
  
She looked back to the napping man, but he didn't seem to have noticed. It took Faye a moment to realize the old chief was talking to her. "Sleeping Wolf?" she repeated, sitting up slowly. Surprisingly, it didn't hurt too much. She still felt sore, but very well rested and the dizziness was all but gone replaced by an annoying but tolerable headache.   
  
She kneeled, sitting on her heels and facing the old man. He still didn't look up. "If you cannot see your shadow it will cover you," he said.  
  
Faye felt her eyebrow jerk and she tried to smile at the obviously senile old man. "R-right." There was a long silence, and she wondered if she was allowed to leave. Still, she couldn't help but be curious… "Um…sorry, but did you call me Sleeping…Wolf, was it?"   
  
No reply. The sand kept trickling from the wrinkly fingers like it could go on forever.   
  
Man this felt awkward. Silence was a virtue as long as it's not from people with ominous auroras. "I just can't see myself as a wolf, you know?" Faye didn't know why she was rambling like this.   
The chief just made her nervous, sitting there like he could see right through her without looking. She'd always thought Spike could do that, but the difference was he didn't seem to care what he saw inside her if he saw anything at all. No matter what, he'd just sit there and mind his own affairs until a bounty came up or an opportunity to crack a joke presented itself.   
  
Faye didn't want to take in any more of the thick air. She stood up, and gladly discovered her balance had returned. He might not be much of a conversationalist but this guy could certainly patch people up. "Well, thanks for whatever you did," she said, bending down to go through the flap in the tent.  
  
His voice caught her before she'd made it out. "The wolf can survive by itself," he said. "But it needs the rest of its pack to achieve full potential. Survival may not be enough."  
  
Faye didn't know how to respond to that, so she just gave a quiet "Really..." and walked out into the cool evening air.   
  
Martian nights came early, even in summer. The horizon still glowed red with the last traces of sunset, but the rest of the sky went from dark blue to black space and stars. Nice night, even if the harbor smelled bad.   
  
She walked out towards the edge of the waterfront, maneuvering around the garbage and ship debris which coated the ground as a symbol that she was in the wharf's "cheap-seat" dock. The Bebop had parked here many times. There was no disorientation about where she was, Faye knew this area of town pretty well—although she'd never noticed the tepee before.   
  
So she'd really made it to Mars... Faye had to admit, part of her had been convinced it was a dream or hallucination, but she was here. She was here and that meant all those other things could really have happened; the moon, the blue ship, the crash, and—  
  
"Awake are you?"   
  
Faye stopped short; the voice came from behind, had she passed him without seeing? It seemed they were always passing each other. She wanted to ask him where he'd been. She wanted to ask him what happened. She wanted to know if he'd figured it out—was he alive or not? She wanted him to tell her why he'd stayed away, to give her an explanation… and yet she knew he probably had nothing to say that she'd understand let alone want to hear, so she set her jaw, raised her hands to rest behind her head, and sauntered over to where he sat.   
  
"Not a bad place," she commented on the tepee as she sat down. "I doubt a hospital would've done better."  
  
Spike had been smoking, but he took the cigarette out of his mouth when she sat down next to him. She stretched out her legs, making herself comfortable; they both tended to do that often—always finding a spot to recline in when the time came to just stop and smell the pollution.   
  
"Laughing Bull does a good job," he replied. "You should thank him for helping you; he's not Jet you know."  
  
"I did."   
  
A brief trace of surprise crossed Spike's face for an instant before he slipped back down into his silent smoking. Faye's sudden recollection of manners seemed to bother him, and she began to feel out of place in the quiet.   
  
Quickly, she tried to undo the damage. "I'm not a complete shrew you know," she threw extra drama into her insulted tone and Spike gave his old, short laugh.  
  
"That remains to be seen," he reminded her with the usual smile, and they settled back into silence as they watched the boats in the harbor. He took a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and offered another nail in her coffin which she gratefully accepted.  
  
For that moment, it was like old times. It was the same feeling; that "Bebop" feeling that described so much of their time together as bounty hunters. She felt like she was sitting in the living area with Spike again, on that ugly yellow couch, watching the television instead of the harbor in comfortable silence like they'd done so many times. A silence--not the bad kind--often broken by their trade of insults before returning to what it had been. Those times had felt natural.   
  
Faye knew things couldn't bee the same as they were before, not all the time, but right now she just felt so worn out, more in the mind than in the body. She didn't want to deal with her anger and sadness and everything else she blamed him for. Now just wasn't the time for that. Now, she planned on sitting there and enjoying her cigarette and his company.   
  
~~  
The Bebop would exit the Gate in just under an hour, and then they would be at Earth. Jet sat back in the pilot's chair, watching the gold, blurred starlines through the window and letting his mind wander.   
  
A beeping from the communicator interrupted his thoughts, and Jet once again found Detective Asmerik's nose taking up space on the screen.  
  
"Thought you should know they've increased the reward for Yolan Davis," said his friend. Jet heard the door open and Margaret's soft steps on the cabin floor. She came up behind him, watching the screen over his shoulder but not at an angle for the detective to see her. "He's worth three million now."  
  
Jet raised an eyebrow. "Oh? People actually buying the opium?"  
  
Asmerik chuckled, leaning back in his chair. "Actually he's become a suspect in a serial murder case," he replied, voice a bit distorted from the cigar between his lips. "The forensics team just discovered that the bodies from ten unsolved cases have poppy spores on their skin."  
  
"Three million seems pretty small for ten murders," Jet commented, irritated at his bad luck. "Is the ISSP getting cheap or were the families of the victims too poor for a decent price?"  
  
"Some of the families were very rich, actually."  
  
Jet nodded. Margaret's footsteps could be heard again, and soon the sound of the door as she left the room.   
  
"But it's not as if we've named him the murder, Jet," the detective reminded him, getting a little defensive. "He's just as suspect after all. If it turns out he is the murderer than the price will go up…"  
  
**  
  
Margaret started running as soon as the door closed behind her. She rushed into the living area where her bag was and dug out her communicator, then began a frantic search for a place to make a call without Jet barging in or overhearing.   
  
After trying out a few rooms that seemed insufficient, she came upon a dark room with a bad smell. The scent came from cigarette smoke, packed into a tight space. Aside from the smoke smell, there was also that stuffy, thick air which meant the room had been closed up and unlived in for a while. It would do.  
  
She locked the door behind her, switched on the light, sat down on an unmade bed and dialed the number. "It's me," she greeted the man as soon as his face appeared on the small screen.  
  
He looked about to have a heart attack. "Marg!" he exclaimed, then looked left and right, worried about attracting attention. "How did you get a connection through the field?" he whisper-shouted.   
  
"I'm not on Venus anymore, Yolan," she told him, then kept talking before he could rebuke her with some panic-inspired remark. "Quick, now tell me where you are."  
  
Yolan Davis was shaking his head, looking awful in mental conflict. "No, no, no… why did you leave the shop?" he asked, obviously worried. "He said he wouldn't hurt you if you stayed where you were supposed to—you have to go back!"  
  
She shook her head vigorously and opened her mouth but he kept going before she got a word in.  
  
"I'm almost finished, it's almost over," she'd obviously made things worse by checking in with him. "Please go back to Venus—I'll be back in no time and—"  
  
"I can't go back, Yolan!" she interrupted. "I found out about the murders!"   
  
Davis looked surprised and ashamed.   
  
"You said he wanted you to help him find some people," Margaret hissed. "You didn't tell me he was going to kill them!"  
  
He began to shake his head again, sick-looking and distraught. "He's an assassin, Marg! If I didn't do what he told me—"  
  
"I can't let him use us like this!" she glared at him and he stared back with a dumb and miserable expression. "I'm going to stop this here and now—tell me who the next target is."  
  
"I can't. You'll get hurt, and I won't let you. Ben would—"  
  
"My brother wouldn't want me involved in anyone's murder, you know that. Now please help me stop this and tell me who the target is. I know he's on earth—I saw the moon in the paper—but I need a name. Please."  
  
Yolan kept shaking his head as if he didn't know how to do anything else. But suddenly he stopped and his expression quickly changed again as something occurred to him. "How did you get off Venus?"  
  
"This guy is giving me a ride. I'm on his ship now, we're still in the Gate," Margaret explained, but she decided to leave out the fact that Jet was a Cowboy.   
  
"Just some guy? How do you know you can trust him—wait I don't want to hear about it, you used that…you did it again didn't you?"  
  
She secured the sunglasses over her eyes and didn't respond.  
  
"You have to stop doing that! That—it's a--it will get stronger the more you use it."  
  
"I'm being careful."  
  
Pause. "What ship are you on?"  
  
"It's called the Bebop."  
  
And she'd thought he couldn't have gotten any paler. "The BEBOP!?" he repeated as if he couldn't believe his ears. "GET OUT OF THERE! GET OUT OF THERE RIGHT NOW!"  
  
Margaret jumped back and held the comm. away from her face. "What's your problem!?"  
  
"The next target!" Yolan was shaking. "A woman named Faye Valentine, she lives on a ship called Bebop—he'll be coming after her, you have to get out!"  
  
Margaret pursed her lips. "Faye Valentine," she repeated, making a note of the name. She then smiled sweetly, trying to put Yolan at ease. "Don't worry, she's not on the ship right now."  
  
"Please…" he sure did sound desperate. "Get out before she comes back."  
  
Margaret's thoughts drifted back to the photo of the Earth with the moon hanging over it. "I intend to." She sent him another smile. "Don't worry, everything will be fine. Now where are you?"  
  
"Mars. I'll be finished soon and my next stop is Ganymede."  
  
"Be careful. I have to go now, we're here."  
  
**  
  
Jet flew the Bebop out of the Gate and into view of the planet Earth. It looked perfectly normal—ring around the edges, and no moon in the sky.   
  
"We're here," he announced as Margaret reentered. "What port are you headed for?"  
  
She walked over to the window searching the area of space around the planet and—upon not seeing the moon---looked severely disappointed and a tad angry. "Missed her," she grumbled.   
  
They flew low over an oceanside desert near the coast of what was once California, where Jet figured he'd find Faye. As the Bebop got low enough to see the ground clearly, he spotted a funny little ship parked out in the dunes. It looked like an expensive monocraft, although he didn't recognize the model. It was black—or maybe dark blue—with stubby bat-like wing extensions.   
  
"Here is fine," Margaret suddenly said, pointing to the ground near the ship.   
  
"Here?" Jet echoed. "It's at least three miles to the nearest town, though desert you know."  
  
"I'll be fine."  
  
Jet gave an exasperated sigh. "Suit yourself." He started the landing procedures. "Now that we're here you can tell me about Yolan Davis."  
  
He felt her watching him through the red lenses. "You have to bring him in alive right?" she asked slowly. "You have to keep him alive, right?"  
  
"If he's dead I don't get the money."  
  
Margaret exhaled loudly. "Fine then," she said. "I suppose you can take better care of him than he can of himself. He's heading off to Ganymede, I don't know exactly where." There was a pause, then, "Tell him you met me, when you find him. It might make him cooperate more."  
  
Jet gave a cynical laugh. Turncoat—so it was with the X chromosome. "Are you selling out a friend?"  
  
"For his own good."  
  
He shook his head. "You're going to grow up to be a familiar type of woman," he warned her.   
  
The Bebop landed in the sand, and Margaret turned to leave. She paused halfway down the hall and retrieved something from her pocket. "Here," she said, handing it to him. It was a dried, pressed yellow Opium Poppy blossom. "That one's free. It might come in handy."  
~~~  
  
"So what did you do this time?" Spike asked. His face wore the usual, causal smile. "Must've been bad for a person to skip placing a bounty and go right for the kill."  
  
Faye shrugged, then stretched her arms out in front of her, cracking her knuckles. "I dunno… he mentioned he's getting paid, the one time I talked to him," she replied nonchalantly. "Must be an assassin. Don't know who hired him though."  
  
Spike raised an eyebrow. "Someone paying for your head?" he sounded amused and unsurprised. "That's expensive. You finally ticked off the wrong rich guy."  
  
She smiled. "Bound to happen sooner or later."  
  
"Heh, that's true," he admitted. "You really haven't changed."  
  
"Neither have you."  
  
The last comments left them both quiet. They'd said that without thinking, but the meaning behind the words began to creep in and dampen their casual mood.  
  
Spike glanced at Faye for a moment; she was leaning back and staring at the ground. He turned his now solemn gaze back on the water but didn't watch the boats. He couldn't think of a thing to say.  
  
He didn't know why things were like this. He didn't know why, from the moment they'd met up again, they'd both tired their hardest to rip thought from their discourse. They were both, he knew, trying to avoid those drastic emotions which had come forward the last time they'd spoken.  
  
He remembered the sound of her gun when he walked away. It had been louder than any of the guns he'd faced later on that day.   
  
They had changed. They both knew it.  
  
She'd regained her memories, whatever those might be, and he'd gone off faced his own past. Spike had felt no reaction when she'd told him she remembered, but now he wondered if she was lucky to have gone back and found nothing, lucky to not have anything chasing her till it killed her.   
But then again, judging from that tape, the past that would never chase her wasn't so bad.   
  
Many times since he'd woken he'd wondered what she would have said to him if they met up again. He would expect her to yell and him about how he couldn't just show up like nothing happened—but she'd throw a tantrum, because Faye was Faye, and when it was over it really would be as if he'd never left.   
  
He remembered, after receiving that bad piece of news, that he'd felt disappointed. He'd thought he'd never get to hear her shout at him again, and somehow it was a distressful thought. The room he'd woken up in was too quiet, and nobody had scolded him for his injuries. It didn't feel…correct.  
  
But now she was here. She was here and all either of them could do was have an idle conversation. Chitchat. He wished she'd yell. If she did, he could yell back, they could fight, and he'd have an excuse to focus his attention on her. He needed to do that, to see only her for just a moment so he could deal with his relief of finding her alive.  
  
"Spike…" Faye said slowly, seriously, and quietly. From the tone in her voice, it seemed like he would get the confrontation he'd wished for. He lifted his head a little to watch her, and found her looking right at him. She was like that—not afraid to look someone in the face—but after his comments about his vision before he left, he doubted she'd look him in the eye any time soon, at least not close enough to really see.   
  
"Why didn't you come back?" she asked. Her eyes were narrowed and focused on him; she looked angry and possibly hurt. "You didn't have to—I know you went back to wherever it was you were really living—but why didn't you at least call when it was over?"  
  
Spike stared at her for a moment, taking that last part in. Where he'd really been living… perhaps some part of her actually understood.   
"I woke up too late."  
  
"What are you talking about?"  
  
"Some man pulled me off the steps," he began. "He patched me up without my consent, and when I woke up he said he had to leave the planet soon and asked me who he should send for me. I told him to call the Bebop."  
  
Faye held her previous expression. "Nobody called."  
  
"I know. He told me about the Bebop being destroyed, so—"  
  
"WHAT?!" Faye interrupted, standing up quickly. Her eyes were wide with surprise. "D-Destroyed?"  
  
Well she'd certainly caught him off guard. "You didn't know?" he'd assumed she'd known—just how soon after him did she leave the ship?  
  
Faye looked like something in her brain had stopped. "When did this happen?" she asked in a worn out voice, falling back down in her spot with a painful sounding clatter.  
  
Spike stood up and stepped in front of her. "Not sure exactly…" he said. Vaguely he wondered if she was more concerned about Jet or about the last 'home' she had. "I was knocked out for about four days, and apparently it happened in that time…" he trailed off when he saw her sending him a terrible look.  
  
He felt a sting in his left shin as she quickly kicked him in the leg. "Don't do that to me!" she shouted, leaping up once more but this time propelled by fury. "I left the Bebop three days ago—what you're talking about was weeks before!" she took a swing at his face which he barely dodged.  
  
As quickly as she'd started, Faye calmed down almost all the way. She exhaled a loud, frustrated breath. "You were misinformed, obviously," she finally said, voice fuming still. "Who on Mars told you the Bebop was destroyed!?"  
  
A bit at a loss for words, Spike managed to get out a description. "Ah, um this red haired guy—had a barcode on the neck…what?" That look again. Her eye was twitching.   
  
"Don't tell me…" she began to dig into her jacket pocket. Her voice sounded like it might either laugh or scream. That crazed smile—actually more of a twitch of the lips—she got when all her bad luck combined appeared on her face. "This guy?"   
  
She held up a mugshot for him to see. Spike took it and gave it a once over. "Yolan Davis, the newest bounty?" her face had yet to settle, a fit was obviously on its way. "Well you're right, that's him."  
Meanwhile, Yolan Davis himself walked unsteadily through the backstreets and darker alleyways. His hands were shaking, his eyes were unfocused, and he was sweating like a pig.   
  
There was so much on his half-present mind he felt like he'd welcome a stroke. He wanted his worries out of his head for just a moment; just a moment so he could focus on what he had to do and not the consequences.   
  
Finally, he came across a welcome face he'd never seen before under a dimming streetlamp. "Something troubling you, buddy?" asked the man.   
  
"I-I just need to calm down." Sorry Ben. So so sorry.  
  
"Tranquility's just a thousand, special price for new friends."  
  
Sorry sorry sorry   
  
He handed over the money and took the envelope offered to him.   
  
So so sorry   
  
Fifteen minutes later his hands were still, he could see again, and his skin was cool. He was sorrier now more than ever, but that would have to wait. He still had a job to do.   
  
Shifting the heavy bag on his shoulder, he turned back on to the main road and headed west. Senses dulled, Yolan didn't notice he was being followed. A small, sporadic figure hopped and crawled and marched along the path behind him, and behind her trotted a stubby legged dog.   
  
She turned to her animal companion and, with a finger over her lips, reminded it, "If we see a stranger, follow him!"  
  
To be continued.  
Oh my freaking goodness that was difficult. I like to believe that anyone who's ever written a bebop fic has come across the problem of Spike. He is, in my opinion, one of the most difficult characters to write and to the writers of those few fics I've read that seemed to do him perfectly, how the [insert word-of-choice here] do you do that?!  
Gah! This chapter was a lot harder to write than I would have preferred, so I hope you all liked it.   
Oh and I feel that since I mention drugs in this I have a responsibility to tell all the kiddies out there to be cool and stay in school and just say no and yadda yadda yadda—drugs suck, okay? There, my morality is satisfied.  
And on another note, yes this fic has secondary characters that are important to the plot, but don't worry I promise they won't take up unnecessary chapters with their little problems when we all really want to read about is the Bebop crew. It's just hard for the characters to be angsty and keep the plot moving at once, ya know? So I've got a few more people running around keeping things moving while the real characters sit back and over think themselves into emotional epiphanies.   
Yeah, like that made sense.  
  
At any rate, please review because I'll love you forever and ever and it's just no fun to write without feedback. 


	4. the last fragments of you

What's this? I have to write a disclaimer? Bah, fine. But I'll tell you all something, I own Cowboy Bebop. That's right, I own it! I also own the Wonka chocolate factory and the free world. Know what else? I own YOU! That's right! I own you all—BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!! *diabolical laughter*  
  
*ahem* ok so that wasn't true (yes it was)   
I don't own so don't sue, mkay?  
  
Chapter 4  
  
~~*flashback*~~  
  
The moon—the wrong moon for this red planet—finally faded away and left the sky looking as it should. The man trudged out of the abandoned apartment building, dragging his feet and trying not to stare at the little white flakes of light that fell from where the image had been. It looked so much like snow—beautiful shimmering snow—and he remembered home.  
  
It didn't snow where he lived. It rained. It rained horrible little spores and seeds and pollen that glinted in the orange light of Venus and came down to kill the planet's people.   
  
Come to think of it, it was the rain's fault for this whole mess. If it hadn't rained and hurt that girl the operation would never had happened.   
  
But then again…  
  
If she hadn't found him lying on the road that night he wouldn't have been there to pay for the operation in the first place and she'd be all right. Deformed, but all right.   
  
But then again…  
  
She'd been scared of him. It was her brother who'd seen he was alive and decided to take him in. If her brother hadn't saved him this whole thing wouldn't have happened.   
  
But then again…  
  
If he hadn't taken those drugs he'd never have needed saving. Which meant it was his fault. All his fault. The moon was gone now, that was a sign—another person was dead. That made the tenth.   
And it was all his fault. Even if he hadn't been the one to pull the trigger, those ten were dead because of what he'd done. If that damn girl's damn brother hadn't been so damn good a person he would have been left to die like he should have, and none of this would have happened. It was all his fault.  
  
The man clenched his fists and struck the side of the building with it. He was going to hell. He hadn't been able to save his savior. He hadn't been able to save one person—instead he'd killed ten and there were more just a phone call away. .   
  
And then, inevitably at the worst of times, his communicator buzzed. He brought a limp hand to his inside pocket and drew out the mobile, not wanting to answer but knowing the consequences for his stupid stupid wants.   
  
"Flowers dead?" asked the person on the other line. The devil, or his advocate, had stolen his soul and now he had to work off the debt.   
  
"Of course they are," he answered. "They always die when you finish."  
  
The advocate, a man by the name of Dismer, made a disgruntled noise. "Fine then, fine. You'll be heading off to earth then for the next target."  
  
He winced. "Another? How many more?"  
  
"What—exactly?" Dismer laughed a little for no real reason. He was a very cheerful man for someone so disgusting. "Two, if you must know." The tone of the advocate's voice changed, and he sounded like one of those imps from the clinics who spoke to him as if he needed to be calmed down. "Don't worry—I checked on your kid and she's fine. Two more and you'll both be free, I'll even help you out, if you help me like a good man."  
  
"Where on earth to you want the poppies?"  
  
"Singapore. There's this old wreck of a mansion, I'll email the address when I get it confirmed, but I expect my target to show up there within the month."  
  
The man could only stare at the tiny comm. screen with a morbid look. "How do you figure?"  
  
Dismer rolled his eyes. "You should know by now that I'm excellent at reading people. The target is a woman, and they're a sentimental species. She'll fly back home sooner or later."  
  
"What if she's already there?"  
  
The advocate chuckled, finding the man too humorous for words—although he had a dark sense of comedy to be sure. "Fine, have it your way," a picture of a woman with short dark hair and shifty eyes appeared on the little screen. "If you see her, hold her—you know the drill."  
  
Nodding mutely, the man stared at the eyes of the next one to die, but she hadn't faced the camera and she didn't stare back. The picture was really a mug shot, and thus labeled with a name: Faye Valentine.   
  
The man shuddered. This wasn't the first time he'd seen the face of the now-deceased, but this was the first time he'd known a name along with the picture. He hated to know. When he hadn't known the name it was just another person, another shadowed figure, just anyone he could pass or who could have passed him on the street. But having a name--that made you a person. That made a human exist, or so some part of him believed.   
  
This Miss Valentine… he wished she was still a stranger to him.  
  
"I'll be checking up on you," Dismer reminded him. "Don't have too much fun now," the voice mocked him a little, but it wasn't really hate filled. The advocate didn't care enough to really hate him or anyone really, but killing was Dismer's business and his dark sense of humor made it interesting.  
  
Putting the comm. back in his pocket, the man continued to trudge down the Martian street, light from the shadow of a moon now completely gone. Dawn was coming, and it looked so disgustingly hopeful that he felt sure the sun was mocking him. He turned away from the brightness peeking through the buildings and heaved towards the port where he'd parked his little shuttle.   
  
On his way, about half way up a hill, he passed the old chapel. The building was falling apart at the beams but nobody had ever bothered to do anything about it. The man knew there were rumors about that place, that bad people liked to come there, but even if the church was now a dark homestead he still felt the steeple's cross staring at him disapprovingly for all his sins.   
  
But he wasn't alone this time. A small crowd of people stood around the courtyard in front of the chapel, all looking too nervous to more forward. All of them were watching the open doors leading to a shadowed interior that nobody could see through.   
  
All of them watching, all of them quiet, all of them holding their breath as if waiting for something….  
  
This was certainly a site for curious eyes. This crowd appeared to be Syndicate men. The man stopped a respectable distance behind all those men in their formidable black suits and trench coats and looked at the entryway to the chapel. He couldn't see what the others were staring at, or perhaps it hadn't shown up yet.  
  
The silence felt eerie on the skin, and he found himself holding his breath like all the others. And then something happened. Some shadowed figure came walking slowly out into the light, and all the spectators had their eyes on this new person. They leaned forward, wondering, waiting, wanting an explanation….  
  
This new person was a man covered in blood. His hair was tousled and cuts and bullet holes crossed his body in what appeared to be every place. Nobody rushed forward to help him. Everyone seemed to be waiting still, waiting for something.  
  
The bloody man was smiling a mean, depressing grin and he raised a shaky arm. One eye closed, the other one staring into the faces of the crowd, his fingers formed a makeshift gun and he pretended to fire.   
  
"Bang," said the new one, but our man standing at the back was the only one to jump at the penetrated silence.  
The blood-coated visitor fell in a dead heap on the steps.   
  
It seemed like time stood still for a moment. Someone from the crowd walked slowly forward, each step echoing off of walls that didn't exist, and he stopped in front of the bleeding body on the cement. Taking off his black jacket, the Syndicate man dropped it across the cadaver, then turning back to the others he nodded in the direction of the chapel doors. One by one, step by echoing step, the Syndicate men walked into the church leaving our man still standing in the street to stare in awe at whatever had just occurred.   
  
He looked over to the black jacket, with trickles of blood flowing under the hem and down the stairs, and he felt a horrible sense of familiarity.   
  
The steeple's cross watched him again, and he shuddered under the wait of a God he'd failed. Cautiously, he moved closer to the bloodied heap and lifted the jacket up a little. Automatically, he reached a hand down to check for a pulse. It took him a minute to realize that he'd found one: a slow, failing beat from a heart that wasn't even trying to live.   
  
And the cross stared at him, and the scent of the poppies filled his nose, and the ghosts of those ten people whispered and he remembered he would go to hell because he hadn't saved them…   
  
He stared at the man who was so close to becoming a corpse and remembered his own experiences. If he'd been left to die in the street, there were so many bad things that would never have happened. This man here on the steps… if he were to live would the consequences be bad as well?  
  
But then again…  
  
If he didn't save someone, he'd surely go to hell. So with that thought on his pitiful sliver of a mind, Yolan Davis took out his communicator and called for an ambulance.   
~~*end flashback*~~  
  
"So what happened to my ship?" Faye asked after she'd sufficiently calmed down.   
  
"Impound lot." Spike replied, and it didn't look like he'd say anything else. He was reclining against a rough red Martian rock where they sat outside the tepee by the campfire, waiting for Ed to return from wherever she'd gone.  
  
Faye wished he'd either say something else or just go to sleep. She'd had a good rest, although she still felt slightly ill, and didn't think she could sleep right away. There was so much on her mind right then, she couldn't settle back into the silence she'd enjoyed before their conversation had gotten too serious.   
  
Spike hadn't returned because he thought there was nothing to return to… Faye began to muse on that thought. He said he told his rescuer—or rather her bounty, Mr. Davis--to find the Bebop, which meant that he'd intended to come back after all. But then again, there wasn't really another place Spike could go. Once he'd recovered, would he have left again?   
  
The fact that he might have was so possible it made her feel rather afraid deep down to know that things might have ended up the same, Vicious or no. He'd done what he wanted, he got rid of his past once and for all, and he really didn't need her and Jet. He may have had nowhere else to go but the Bebop before, but now that he was free, Spike Spiegel could go out and find a place—anywhere he wanted! He didn't have to worry about the Syndicate dropping in after all…   
  
But there he was, just sitting next to her. She certainly didn't need help any more, he could have left but he hadn't so maybe he would have stayed…yet…   
  
Perhaps he knew, she realized. Perhaps he knew that it was her who had nowhere to go, and no will to find a place. Perhaps Spike was only sitting there with her, waiting for Radical Edward and her dog, because he felt a Jet-like urge to take in strays.   
  
Or perhaps he wanted to return to the Bebop with her.   
  
The different possibilities spun in Faye's mind until she couldn't even decide which was the more probable. "Spike?" it was her curiosity taking voice that made her address him, although the rest of her just preferred to sit and wonder.   
  
"Hn?" he grunted, eyes still closed and cigarette between the lips.   
  
She opened her mouth, intending to ask him what his plans were, but lost her nerve and closed it again. Eyes searching for an alternate topic of conversation, they landed on the tepee, and before she knew it she was asking him, "What do you think about wolves?"  
  
Spike, caught off guard by the apparently random question, arched an eyebrow in slight confusion and opened his eyes. "What are you talking about?"  
  
"Wolves," she replied curtly. "What's your opinion?"  
  
He narrowed his eyes, now figuring she was up to something. "They're extinct now, right?" he asked carefully.   
  
"Are they?" her voice sounded distracted.   
  
"What brought this on?" Spike followed her gaze and his eyes landed on the tepee. He suddenly grinned slyly at her. "I get it, he gave you a nickname, didn't he? that old man…" he jerked his head towards Laughing Bull's tent.  
  
Faye cracked a smile. "As a matter of fact he did."  
  
"So what is it?"  
  
" 'Sleeping Wolf', if you must know." The corners of her mouth turned up as the small smile turned to a smirk and she looked back at him. "Do ~you~ have a nickname?"   
  
Spike, still looking amused, closed his eyes again and settled back into his previous position. " 'Swimming Bird'."  
  
Faye blinked once, registering that, then gave a little laugh.   
  
"What?"  
  
"My animal can eat yours."  
  
~~*Flashback*~~  
  
Yolan tapped the keyboard, same key with the same finger, over and over again. He didn't know what he was doing, let alone where to start. Computers weren't his thing, nothing was actually, but now that he knew the name of the target he just had to know who she was.   
  
A woman at the cyber café helped him log onto the YMCA website to look up old bounties. He told her he was a bounty hunter but she'd merely given him the smile-and-nod, obviously thinking he was some sort of ridiculous Cowboy aficionado. He had to admit he wasn't surprised, it wasn't as if he had the confidence or the build or even the air about him to get involved with the Y—so he just tapped the keys one at a time in an amateur fashion and browsed the website.  
  
He was searching, desperately so, for something to ease his conscious. That picture of her was a mugshot, right? So she was a criminal. Perhaps she was a murderer—maybe she'd massacred someone and would have gotten the death penalty anyway so it would be no big deal if Dismer killed her. Maybe she deserved it!  
  
But two hours of searching later, Davis lost hope. Faye Valentine was not a murderer. She was not on death row. In fact, the bounty on her head wasn't even active anymore—she was a bounty hunter herself! She was just a gambler and a cheater—a woman with human flaws not even bordering on his own. She was probably just minding her own business on that Bebop ship she was last registered at, or bringing a criminal to justice or something not worth being killed for.  
  
So he was a criminal. An accessory to murder and a drug dealer and the two things he could say he'd done right with almost certainty was escaping weed and pulling some guy off the chapel steps—a man who was still unconscious back at the hotel and probably wouldn't even make it.   
  
If he found this Faye, she'd probably turn him in for some woolongs before he could even warn her what was coming. But he couldn't warn her anyway. If he did, and if Dismer couldn't kill her, Margaret would never get that horrible collar off and things would get worse and worse.   
She'd been growing more and more unstable, and the damage would be irreversible if that monitor wasn't removed soon not to mention the damage she could inflict on others with that disgusting gift of hers…  
  
This had to stop, Yolan decided. It really did. Had it taken ten murders for him to finally crack under the pressure? No… he could keep going…just two more and it would be done with and when Margaret was free and able to take care of herself he could make up for everything by throwing himself off a building or something… just two more…  
  
Yolan paid for his computer time and trudged back to the hotel, dragging his feet once again. . But when he opened the door he received his second piece of news: that man he'd saved, he was awake!  
  
Lying on the ugly and now bloodstained sheets was the skinny, bandaged person, staring up at the ceiling and looking, well, bored.   
At least this was good news. The guy could tell him who to call, and Yolan could finally get off of Mars and over to Earth to set the trap.  
  
"Good! You're awake!" he cried, rushing over. "I guess that means you'll make it—I was really amazed you'd lived with all those injuries but still I wasn't optimistic in the least bit. I'm not that lucky, you know."  
  
The man's eyes, weird looking reddish-brown ones, flicked over to give him a kind of sarcastic look as if to say: I'm here injured and you're complaining about YOUR luck? But instead all the man said, and with a generous amount of effort, was "Where?"  
  
"You're on Mars," Yolan told him. "Not too far from where I found you, just a few blocks, actually." He paused, then pulled up the chair from the desk and sat backwards. He was smiling, which something in the back of his mind found odd. After all, with his life, why should he smile? But something had actually gone right. He'd saved a person! Sure Faye Valentine would die because of what he was going to do, but he'd at least saved this person and maybe that was enough for redemption.   
  
"You were so beaten up, and with all those Syndicate men around-really! I'm curious, what happened to you?"  
  
The man's expression was a mixture of 'who the hell is this guy' and 'this is completely the wrong time'.   
  
"Well you're probably too tired to do anything right now so I'll call room service and have them bring up something—I think you're stomach's in one piece so you should get some food—oh! Hey, what's your name anyway?"  
  
The man closed his eyes again, looking worn out but still very bored. "Spike Spiegel" he muttered almost bitterly but with definite casualness, then more to himself, "I haven't escaped myself yet."  
~~*end flashback*~~  
  
Jet frowned at the computer, and it "frowned" back, beeping and buzzing with annoying persistence as it tried to made sense out of the flower. He'd put Margaret's little gift through the data analyzer, but the machine couldn't make heads or tails out of it. One thing was clear: it might look like a poppy, and smell like a poppy, but it certainly was NOT a poppy.   
  
Which brought across the question: what kind of drugs would a flower like this make?  
  
At first he hadn't thought twice about it, but then he remembered something the detective had said. Those ten bodies Yolan was a suspect for had been covered in "poppy spores". The words had bothered him, and Jet couldn't figure out why until he took a good look at the flower Margaret had given him and realized something: poppies don't have spores.  
  
Poppies reproduce though pollination, which meant that there was something up with this whole opium business. At first he'd figured that the kid had given him a different flower, but when he researched the subject he saw no outward difference between his dried souvenir and the picture of a real poppy on his computer.   
  
Someone had made this plant to look like its narcotic producing twin—he said made, because the genetic structure had been altered and that didn't just happen on its own. The data analyzer hadn't seen anything like it: a plant with human DNA strands combined with some kind of chemical…   
  
…"Apparently this flower gives off a hallucinogen," Jet was explaining to the Red Tail. He hadn't been able to find Faye, and she didn't answer her communicator, so he was leaving a message on her ship. "The spores go into the atmosphere and they are set to produce some kind of image, even out into space. I tried to make the image appear but apparently it needs to react with something else to work, I don't know what, and I don't think it'll work with the poppy I've got because it's dried.  
  
The Red Tail didn't seem to care, and Jet glared at the communicator with anger and frustration. It would be just like Faye not to check in—well actually more like Spike; Faye was the one to leave without checking in and maybe call later. If a job went too long or too slow, Faye would often get bored and call in, usually talking to Edward.   
  
It had been almost four days now without word from her, and Jet had started to worry a little until he remembered that this was Faye here. No matter what she did or where she went, leaving for good or for a job or what not, she always drifted back one way or another.  
  
"I'll try to find out more, meet me on Ganymede, the bounty's headed there."  
~~*Flashback*~~  
  
And Spike had thought the Bebop's ceiling was ugly; it had nothing on this hotel.   
  
He still couldn't move, in fact, he could hardly talk—not that he really felt like talking to that weird red-haired guy who'd apparently saved him.   
  
It was so strange. For the first time in his life, Spike couldn't quite figure out what he was thinking. His thoughts kept drifting, landing on various things of extreme or little consequence.   
If I'm alive, did Vicious make it? Where's my ship, anyway? What's the date? Damn this hurts…  
  
Pain had been the strange surprise which had roused him from sleep. It wasn't as if he hadn't been hurt before, but normally, a few bumps and bruises and lacerations and bullets through various parts didn't seem to be that big a deal—well that may be overdoing things, but really, he'd been in more discomfort than actual pain.   
  
Nerves of steel? No, he'd just been unable to feel. He'd dulled himself against emotional pain, but somewhere along the line, physical pain had subsided too, leaving him in a grey world of only half-sensations.   
  
It wasn't as if, right then, things had gone from grey to rainbow, but blotches of pale colors seemed to be peeking through as he tried to move and found that a bullet through the arm hurt more than he remembered.   
  
"I'm back!" and yet, the most persistent pain came from Spike's severe annoyance with this tanned fellow who still hadn't revealed his name. "How are you feeling?"  
  
Spike stared at the man and for the first time realized he looked not unlike like a male, older Edward on steroids. "Disturbed."  
  
The man raised an eyebrow in slight confusion, and then seemed to shrug it off. "Well you look better than yesterday… I think it would be safe to move you now…" The man looked jerky.   
  
From the moment Spike had woken he'd noticed something odd about him. Red-head was always trying to look very calm and pleasant, but mere millimeters under the surface was some kind of frightened, twitching, animal wearing human skin. "A-anyway, I've got a family thing—Business, I've got business off world—I don't live on Mars you see, which explains the hotel and…" Finally giving up with attempted excuses, Red-head asked, "Is there someone I can call to get you?"  
  
Spike stared, not at anything in particular, and felt his thoughts collide once more as his mind was bombarded with flashes of memory and scenarios.  
  
He could picture it, and it was nothing glamorous, but what he knew would happen. He'd have to lie on that gross plastic couch, with Faye's ridicule and Jet's you-did-it-to-yourself commentary. If he tried to come back with any bits of sarcasm, the shrew would punch his injuries at such an angle that even he, buried deep as he could go in memories, could feel the pain from it.   
  
And they would yell at him, and Faye would just about blow her top and probably storm off the ship with his money, headed for a casino.  
And he could just hear her. She'd give him a lecture—she'd do it as often as she could before he could walk again—and she'd tell him what an idiot he was for getting himself into such a mess and she would remind him that she warned him and she'd say "I told you so". She'd probably give him another punch for good measure, and Jet would roll his eyes, pretending he wasn't completely amused.   
  
Somehow, for reasons Spike wasn't sure of, the thoughts of those two giving him a hard time took some weight off his mind as he rolled his eyes at the visions and imagined comebacks to their sarcasm. But the pain from his various injuries seemed to have increased a little.   
  
"Well, I suppose you could call the ship I lived on," Spike told Redhead, breathing through the pain and craving a cigarette.   
  
"All right then!" the man seemed incredibly relieved. "What's the name of the ship?"  
  
"The Bebop."  
  
There was a pause. "Bebop, you said?" Spike couldn't name the look on Redhead's face, but it was pretty close to a twitching panic and he began to mutter something about a woman before he replied, "I think that's the name of the ship that crashed into Callisto, I'm sorry."  
  
It happened so fast it was almost unexpected, but the pain faded from his scaring skin and simmered down into a minorly distracting throb. It was as if he could already feel the broken bones speed their healing. Spike didn't even realize everything looked gray again; he merely perceived it as normal. The chaos in his mind ceased, replaced with only a few stray thoughts.   
Dead, huh? Figures; something like that was bound to happen.   
  
So what now?   
  
Dimly he recalled the last time he'd thought that. It had been just after Julia; before he'd met Jet, and even before he'd become a cowboy. He'd been reclining on a park bench close to dawn, in this very city in fact, dead tired and just out of the hospital—or whatever you'd call that place.   
  
His cigarette had almost burned completely, and the city looked incredibly unfocused and dismal in the pale sunbeams that peeked though before their source. But maybe it hadn't been the sky, but his brand new eye not appreciating the aesthetics of it—then again, he couldn't appreciate much at that time, and little more since.   
He'd let the smoke add to the grey blur of the town, and he'd wondered: what now?  
  
~*end flashback*~  
  
Faye's patience had run out hours ago. The sun would rise within the hour and Ed—who according to Spike had gone off exploring when she was forbidden help with the injured Faye-Faye—was still unaccounted for, and neither was the dog.   
  
"Why don't you call her?" asked Spike in a slightly irritated fashion. He sat on a log aside the dying fire, absently watching Faye pace.  
  
Making some sort of noise that bordered on primal, Faye threw her communicator at him, which he caught. "It's that piece of junk," she snapped. "I don't know what happened to it but it hasn't worked for days."  
  
Spike turned the comm. over in his hands, eyeing it with casual interest. He pressed the call button but nothing happened although the reception registered as good. "You should take better care of your things if you don't know how to repair them," he commented, and she stopped her pacing mid step to glare at him with a slightly twitching eye. He sent her the standard smile for a standard hissy-fit.   
  
Faye strode over with stiff steps and snatched the device back and then, throwing it on the ground, she took out her gun and aimed it at the comm..   
  
"What are you doing?" Spike asked, raising an eyebrow and looking amused.   
  
"Fixing it," replied Faye, flashing a grin over her shoulder. "The Spike Spiegel way—or should I kick it first?"  
  
Raising his hands in mock surrender, and with a noise something between a sigh and a laugh, Spike stood up and moved toward her. "Fine, fine, you've made your point now don't waist good machinery."  
  
"Well," Faye resigned, hiding her weapon again and picking up the communicator, "If the kid ever shows up she can probably make it work." She shoved it in her jacket pocket next to her deck of cards. "Guess that leaves waiting."  
  
Eyeing Faye as she sat down again, trying to make herself comfortable, Spike gave an exasperated sigh and stuffed his hands in his pockets. "Well come on," he ordered, starting to walk towards the dock entry in the direction of the main road. "We can call her from my hotel."  
  
"Hotel?" Faye echoed loudly, jumping up. "Why didn't you say that earlier?! We wouldn't have had to sleep on the ground!" She jogged to catch up with him before matching his strides with her hands on her hips.  
  
Spike shrugged. "I figured Ed would be back sooner," he replied, but not in a tone that was trying to defend him.   
  
Faye made a growling noise and muttered things about stupid men and their stupid logic. "What happened to your communicator? We could've called from here if you had your heart set on sleeping on rocks."  
  
He shrugged again. "Don't carry it with me."  
  
She opened her mouth with every intention of telling him how stupid that was—what if there was an emergency et cetera—but caught herself just in time as she realized the reason. He'd left his comm. behind because he had nobody to call. For the past few weeks, Spike had been—or at least thought he was—completely alone.   
  
Trotting slightly behind him now, Faye's mind began to drift back to the times before the Bebop. She'd always carried her cellular phone—it took her a long time to think of it more as a science fiction device than a phone—just in case. She'd gone through a few partners in crime, and kept a few contacts on her good side, but normally she'd worked alone. But she'd made and received plenty of calls either way, always talking to bookies and establishments wanting to hire the famous Poker Alice.   
  
But Spike wasn't the type to get into that kind of trouble—he got into trouble of course, but not her particular kind. Spike had a manner about him that allowed him to easily slip in and out of a conversation, and Faye realized for the first time how lucky he was to have such a talent. Without that, he would have spent all his time in silence, which is cruel even for someone who prefers solitude.  
  
Again Faye wondered what Spike was planning. After she called Ed, she planned on calling Jet and giving him the news about their not-all-that-dead comrade. She could just imagine the old man throwing a fit worse than she could ever do and going all parental on the bounty hunter's sorry butt.   
'What makes you think you can just come back after that stunt you pulled?', Faye could just hear Jet say that, but of course they both wanted Spike back not to mention Ed and Ein.   
  
But would Spike come back? Would he continue to be a cowboy, the notorious occupation for those who have nothing left? Would he even want to stay once again on a fishing boat with no meat and nothing to offer but the people who'd put his communicator to use?   
  
Spike...  
  
"Hey…" Faye started, catching his attention.  
  
"Hn?" he didn't turn to look at her, but she knew that he was paying attention.   
  
Faye opened her mouth, and shut it again, not sure of how to start. She doubted she'd ever get the hang of serious conversations with the Lunkhead, and suddenly felt grateful that he wasn't facing her, for her expression was bound to look dumb.   
  
She opened her mouth intending to just adlib her way through as usual. "I—AGGH!"  
  
"FAYE-FAYEEEEEE!" Ed cried. She'd jumped Faye from behind and her slinky arms were wrapped around the older woman's neck, much in the same way she'd tackled Spike the day before.   
  
"What's the big idea?!" Faye detangled herself and forced Ed to a normal standing position. "Don't do that to people—and where have you been anyway?!"  
  
But Edward refused to stand still. She began to jump and prance around, an aggravated looking corgi barking at her heels. "Ed has found them! Ed has found them!"  
  
"Found what?" inquired Spike, walking over to the girls.   
  
Faye'd finally managed to grab the child's shoulders, but Ed's head was still rolling this way and that. "Poppies, Ed found!" she announced proudly.   
  
Spike gave Faye a questioning look, and for a moment she appeared just as confused, but then she remembered the job she'd given the kid back on Earth. "Hold it, are you serious?" she shook the girls shoulders, but it didn't seem to help her attention span. "Where are they?"  
  
"Ed will show you!" With a military salute and a smile, Edward wriggled out of Faye's grasp and bounded down the street, Ein in hot pursuit.   
  
"Hey! Hold on!" Faye shouted, but knowing that wouldn't help, she began to run after the pair.   
  
She'd run at least two blocks before the thought came to her that if she lost track of him, she might not find Spike again. She still didn't know if he intended to come back to the Bebop with her or not, now that he didn't need to be patched up anymore, and he'd been sticking around with her to wait for Ed before and now Ed had arrived. So was that all? Faye wondered if he'd just shrug them off like he did everything else and head to his hotel—which she didn't know how to find either. But when she looked over her shoulder, she caught a glimpse of Spike just rounding the corner.   
  
He was following. Not joining in the ridiculous chase, but trailing them. He'd walk quickly when they were in a straight line and within his vision, and when Faye followed Ed around a corner he'd pick up the pace just enough to turn along with them and watch them down the next straight road.  
  
Faye smiled, but her relief melted into nervousness as the path Ed led her on began to look familiar. She'd taken this road before, in a car however, and not because she'd wanted to come.   
  
This couldn't possibly be…  
  
Almost at once, as the knot in her stomach tightened, she found she'd lost track of Edward. Ein's frantic barking however, was enough to lead her to the place some part of her mind knew she'd end up again.   
  
The chapel.   
  
That old relic of a building that was the beginning and end to Spike's life, and that place where she'd gotten tangled in a history she'd rather not have known. The lower windows and great arched doors were all boarded up with a crude 'condemned' sign plastered to the side of the building—everything about this place was dead, and now the church itself had died along with Vicious and Julia and maybe even Spike…   
  
A space between the boards left an opening at the door large enough to crawl through, and it was in front of this hole where Einstein stood, barking madly and only pausing to growl.   
  
"ED!" Faye shouted, panic overtaking her in the manner it only did when Vicious was involved-and this building was everything that man had been.   
  
"ED! Get out of there!" she shouted frantically into the shadowed crack, voice combining with Ein's barks. She quickly looked over her shoulder to see if Spike had caught up yet. He hadn't come into view yet, and Faye suddenly felt it was imperative she grab the kid and get her out before he arrived. "EDWARD!"  
  
"Come in, Faye-Faye!"  
  
"You come out!"  
  
"Poppies! Poppies!"  
  
She shouldn't go in, she knew that. This place wasn't hers, she didn't exist here except as a faded memory of a woman tied to a pillar, used as bait to draw all that really mattered into this chapel. It was a sick, enclosed world that she wasn't a part of, from a time between her two lives.   
This was trespassing.   
  
Taking a deep breath, Faye steadied herself on the rotting boards and climbed into the foyer. Get in, grab Ed, get out. She cast a fleeting glance back at Ein, who stared at her and whined pathetically. Even HE knew better than to go inside.   
  
Walking though the vestibule, she pulled open one of the double doors and entered the main room.   
The first thing that hit her was the smell. It was more than the stuffy, dusty scent of an abandoned building, it was suffocating and horrible. It smelled as if someone had tried to cover up road kill with perfume, and she walked in with a hand over her nose.  
  
"What the…." She trailed off, meaning to finish with 'hell' but finding she couldn't get the word out, even in such a place as this.  
  
Faye looked around in absolute shock. Yellow. Yellow everywhere. What must have been hundreds, maybe thousands, of small yellow poppy blossoms were growing everywhere. They covered the pews and the dirt covered aisle. They were under and on top of the altar, as if a sacrifice to the figure of Jesus on the cross hanging overhead. They surrounded the pillars and, Faye was horrified and disgusted to see, they covered the bodies of dead syndicate men who's corpses were already half eaten by who knew what insects. Yellow. The gross, mustard yellow of the opium poppies basked in the golden glow of no less than twenty sunlamps.   
  
It was a sick dream of a flower garden, and Ed stood in the midst of it all looking oblivious but proud of herself. "Found the poppies, found them, found them!" she chanted. "Can Faye-Faye catch the bounty now?"  
  
She'd been standing with her mouth hanging open, but Faye finally got her jaw to work and forced a smile. "Yes, Ed, good job," she replied weakly. "Now let's go—"  
  
A sudden noise from upstairs caught the girl's attention. They both stared up at the ceiling, which was full of holes between the rafters, but saw nothing through the gaps.   
  
"Ed, go outside," Faye ordered in a low voice, taking her gun out once more and heading for the stairs.   
  
Edward watched her go, and when Faye-Faye disappeared into the shadows she headed for the door but something caught her eye—or her ear more likely. It was the unmistakable hum of a computer, and Ed immediately followed the sound to investigate.  
  
Off to the side, under the bench of an old decaying organ, lay a girl not much older than herself. She was sprawled on the ground, eyes half open and glazed over a bit, but she was alive.   
  
Ed crawled closer, poking and sniffing at the person before noticing the computer she'd been looking for a few feet away. It was a little laptop, sleeker but more archaic than Tomato, and from it extended cords that connected to something around the girl's neck.   
  
"Nya?" Ed tilted her head to the side, remembering that video game Jet had bought once but wouldn't let her try because apparently it did something funny to the brain. "Game is bad-bad," she scolded the girl, who gave no reaction.   
Reaching for the cords connected to the stranger's necklace, Ed made a buzzing sound and unplugged them.  
~   
  
Faye knew she probably should've just gotten out—that had been the plan—but there was someone else in this building. She could only think of two kinds of people who would come to this chapel—syndicate men (or ex ones), and poppy-planting bounties. If there was anyone left who would chase Spike, then she'd have to take care of him before the whole cycle started up again. And if it was Yolan Davis, she could catch him and find out where he got off telling Spike she was dead.   
  
Faye entered the room just behind the large, stained glass window—which was now shattered and offering a view of the city framed with rainbow shards. The pale, predawn light illuminated the place just enough to see a little in each direction, but not enough for her to make out much detail out of the circle of light.   
  
She took a few cautious steps into the room, looking around. This place too, was lined with bodies of men Spike had probably killed. She shuddered involuntarily as she remembered he and Vicious exchanging looks which, at that moment, seemed equally heartless.   
  
Vicious. She could see the man's blood streaked sword catching the morning light at the border of the window's illuminating sphere. That knot in her stomach turned into a wranching pang of fear when she couldn't see a body next to the weapon, and she ran to the middle of the room to get a better look.   
  
Stopping in front of the sword, she knelt down slowly to examine the object. It was definitely Vicious's, that much was for sure, and the blood? Faye would bet a thousand woolongs she didn't have that it was Spike's.   
  
Despite herself, as if controlled by some outside phantom of the building, she reached a tentative hand towards the hilt, but froze midway. Faye brought her hands up, open palmed, by her head as she heard the unmistakable click and felt the cold steel from a gun pressed into her back.   
  
"Nice to see you, Miss Valentine."  
  
Faye felt she could've gone limp right then, but she did not. For a moment, for one horrid moment, she'd believed that it could very well be that indestructible monster of a man behind her, but when she heard the voice that was not Vicious's she felt so relieved she almost forgot about the gun in her spine altogether.   
  
Staring into the shadows behind the sword, Faye saw the crumpled, white haired figure dead as he could be in a dark stain from a long dried pool of blood. It was over then. The past could finally be the past, and it was time to focus on what was going on now, like the man with a gun on her.   
  
She didn't have to guess who this guy was, she recognized the voice from their one prior conversation in Earth's orbit. This was the assassin—the humiliating part was that she found him and not the other way around.   
  
"What now?" she inquired, a sarcastic playfulness in her voice.   
  
Her back was to him, but she could almost feel his smile. "We wait."  
  
"For wha—" Faye lost her breath, and for one brief moment she was sure she'd been shot, although there's been no sound. In that second she'd felt cold and weak in every part of her, and then it vanished altogether.  
  
But below her in the main room something was happening. She could barely register it from the poor view she had of the holes in the floor, but something was going on downstairs. The golden glow of the room underneath had increased, and a bright shimmering light seemed to radiate from everything, particularly from her own body.  
  
Downstairs, Edward was watching as the poppy blossoms had opened all the way and released their glowing spores into the air like Venus gone ultra-violent. Next to her, the girl began to stir and make her way to consciousness, and outside Spike Spiegel stood with Einstein and watched the sky as pieces of it began to glow.   
  
It looked like meteors at first, shinning in the atmosphere, but then they grew larger but not closer. It was light—that was the only way to describe it. Eerily silver-blue glowing pieces of light joined together and expanded, transforming into the appearance of Earth's long gone moon in the Martian sky.   
  
To Be Continued  
  
Hey all! So how was this chapter? Boring? Good? FREAKING LONG??? Well granted the parts with Yolan narrating may have been a bit dull, but I felt it was important that Spike not just appear out of nowhere or anything, and it wasn't as if the Yolan parts weren't about our fav characters so I hope it was forgivable, it's not like I'm going to do it again.   
So, how about that ending scene? Did I confuse you? Oh goody goody gumdrops. Well all you really need to know is that it's the poppies that are making the moon appear. Why? Well I can't give that away now can I? How? Well that'll be in the next chapter.   
The good news is I'm pretty much done with the set-up chapters so now the chaps are gonna be plot-full and stocked up with funky characterization psychological scenes. Fun!   
Anywho, I'd like to say thank you to everyone who'd reviewed so far. Oh. And a lot of you nice reviewers have half written bebop stories that I'm waiting for the next chapters on! *'subtle' hint*   
  
Please review! All the cool kids are doin it! (heh, lovely guilt trip/peer pressure thing there, huh?) 


	5. armageddon starts with fire

Hey there! Here's a quick note to clear up some plot-screwed-upped-ness, if you really like my fancy, schmancy, hyphenated fake word.  
  
Ok so I know that the ending scene to CB didn't take place at the church. Well big deal. It you really care so much about plot continuality you shouldn't be reading Spike revival fics *watches people walk away* Doh!  
  
Anywho... I wanted the scene in the church. Why? Well for reasons both revolving around symbolism and because I've been listening to Walk in the Rain an insane amount of times by even fangirl standards. I put a lot of thought into the settings for the climatic scenes in this story and I feel that the chapel works much better than a half-incinerated office building.   
  
Oh yeah, I know it's been a while since I updated and I apologize hugely for that. At first it was writers block—I banged my head against the wall over and over but no ideas came (go figure…)   
  
And then it was my writing time, which has been invaded by my new neighbor, and I just can't write wit him over my shoulder because I'm one of those self-conscious types.   
  
Oh well, I hope you enjoy chapter 5—it was a long time coming but I still just don't know…  
  
Chapter 5  
  
Margaret felt the stinging sensation behind her eyes before she'd even completely woken up. It warned her of what had happened, so when she looked around to see the glowing flowers she wasn't surprised at all. Instead, panic took over. She didn't know how long she'd been sleeping but Dismer obviously already had a head start, and her chances of finding the target before he did were slim.  
  
The poppies lay all over in full bloom, and the tiny, shinning spores floated up from the open petals towards the ceiling. They were hunting, and she'd have to follow.   
  
"Shit," she hissed, standing up and brushing herself off. She'd just set her rose tinted glasses back on her nose when she noticed she wasn't alone.  
  
"Bad word! Bad word!" scolded a girlish-boyish kid from right next to her. Margaret jumped in surprise as the child leapt at her, proclaiming, "Ed will wash your mouth out with soap!"   
  
The child crashed right into her, slamming Margaret down onto her back with a wriggling mass of someone not quite human but definitely mammalian on her stomach. The poppies had cushioned her fall, and when the two hit the plants the blossoms puffed out an extra cloud of spores as if in defiance.  
  
"Ooowww…."  
  
Her protective glasses dislodged and her eyes already on the ceiling, Margaret could see the spores floating up and up—that was strange…they normally dispersed in all directions… The glowing particles grew brighter as they neared the ceiling, in the way that signaled a target lock, and she squinted to get a better look as the spores sifted through the cracks in the beams.   
  
"Ed! Faye! Are you in there?" somebody called from the door, and the voice was soon followed by a bark.   
  
"Ed is here!" said the thing on her stomach, and Margaret felt her lungs regain their full capacity as 'Ed' jumped off of her and rushed towards the voice.   
  
Margaret got up as well, but kept her focus straight upward, watching the spores filter through the cracks in the paneled ceiling. Going straight up… that meant the target was either in an airship overhead, or…  
  
"Where's Faye?" asked the voice near the door.   
  
Faye? Margaret's head snapped downward as she recognized the target's name, and she looked toward the man and child conversing near the door. The courtyard visible behind them, she noted, was bathed in unnatural moonlight.   
  
  
  
"Faye-Faye went upstairs to see noisy-person."  
  
"Upstairs?" the man repeated as she shouted it at the same time. The guy looked over at Margaret in perplexed surprise.   
  
But he didn't have time to ask make commentary, for she'd already made a beeline for the staircase.   
  
~*~*~*~  
  
"You know, Miss Valentine," the assassin said as if making conversation, "Even if it is my job, I don't believe killing should be ceremonial."   
  
Faye only coughed in reply. More and more of the poppy spores swirled around her, on her, clinging to her skin, stinging her eyes, clouding her air with a suffocating perfume.   
  
She couldn't breathe. And nearly worse, she was positive the radiating particles were getting into her blood, forcing it to heat.   
  
"It would have been easier to just shoot your ship down back while it was en route…" the assassin continued. "But nooo…" he sounded annoyed as he kicked her side, forcing her off her stomach and facing him. Faye looked up at her potential killer, a tall man with brown spiky hair who wore a dark blue flight suit to match his ship. He looked annoyed with something but for some reason, she didn't believe she had much to do with it.   
  
"Old fool insists we do it this way…" his eyes flicked to the window, where a newly formed Moon hovered just above them over the city, bright and full. "God, I hate calling cards…" the assassin muttered to himself before turning his attention to Faye.  
  
She glared at him, fighting off the horrible urge to gag as the spores scratched at her wind pipe, all so she could die frowning at him if dieing had to be done.   
  
His bushy eyebrows twisted up as he looked her up and down, smiling in approval. "Sorry honey," he said in faux drunken sincerity as he lowered his pistol to point at her chest. "I'd much rather date you than kill you."  
  
"Then why don't you?" Faye had to try, although she doubted she could sound very seductive with the glowing pollen scaring her insides.   
  
He laughed a laugh that could have once been charming. "Didn't I tell you? You don't have my price…"  
  
The gun clicked, and his finger moved to the trigger. Faye wanted more than anything to close her eyes, to not have them open in the event she might catch sight of her own blood pulsing out of her, but they wouldn't shut. The pollen in the air stung her irises, and her eyes felt so dry from not blinking, but when faced by the shining black metal pointed at her…Like an intoxicating kind of horror, she just couldn't look away.  
  
Hypnotizing, like the moon had been when she'd drawn her last breath all those years ago.  
  
So Faye watched as he aimed his weapon easily at her, an assassin who'd obviously done his work so often it had become routine—a prostrate woman, very run-of-the-mill—and she watched as some blur of color collided with the man.   
  
When the boom of the gunshot came, nothing hit her save a few scraps of ceiling falling down from where the bullet really landed.  
  
At her eye level on the floor, she saw the assassin tangled up with some teenager wearing red, who was screaming obscenities and trying to punch him. But the man rose easily and shoved her down on the floor in front of Faye.  
  
"Well look who's awake," he huffed, wiping off a streak of blood from his lip, left from the only one of the girl's punches which had landed.   
  
He'd said 'look' but he really wasn't looking. His eyes were cast down as he fumbled though a pocket for something. Sunglasses. "Stay out of this Marg, you know I'll hurt you."  
  
Faye made to stand up, knowing this might be her only chance to run while he was distracted. She'd have preferred to fight him, but unlike ~some~ lunkheads that would remain nameless, Faye knew when it was time to retreat. But between that kick in the side, which had been close enough to her stomach to knock the wind right out of her, and the spores in her lungs, when she'd finally stood straight she almost fell again from a coughing fit.   
  
"Go screw yerself, Dismer!" the girl snapped back at the assassin. She looked around hastily, brown hair a blur with each turn of her head from left to right to left to right, and finally she spotted the katana. "I know you won't kill me!"  
  
Despite herself, Faye shouted a warning as the teen picked up Vicious's sword and faced the killer apparently named Dismer. That sword wasn't meant for children. That sword was meant for a monster…  
  
With idle eyes Faye watched the dawn light reflect off the blade and she found her mind wondering. Vicious had used a katana, the sword of the noble samurai….hadn't she learned that in school or something? Had honor among warriors died with earth's moon? Assassins and children battling each other…had something gone wrong during those fifty-four years she slept, or had humans always been this bad?   
  
And who was this kid anyway—Marg, was it? Short for Margaret? This girl not much older than Ed had saved her—why?  
  
Margaret was talking again—no, shouting again.   
  
"And don't you dare tell me to stay out of this," a hand left the hilt of the katana and gestured at Faye. "I AM this, I'm the reason you're both here, so just—just screw yerself!"  
  
Dismer laughed, and Margaret charged at him with the blade held out. But she stopped short when the click came again—she hadn't even made it half way to her target, and he had the gun out. But it was aimed past the girl, and at the woman.  
  
Once again Faye found herself facing the barrel of Dismer's gun, and his cruelly good natured smile. But the smile was all—the playful eyes were now concealed by dark sunglasses.   
  
Odd… the morning light shone too palely to see properly through tinted lenses, but not only was her assassin wearing them, that girl had worn them too, but she'd removed them.  
  
"You're right Marg, I won't kill you—I need you," Dismer's smile widened. "But I'll kill her," he added, jerking the gun a little but keeping it trained on Faye. "And you need darlin' Miss Valentine, don't you? You don't know where the other target is I'll bet…"  
  
Faye's fists clenched of their own accord. With a final strong cough to clear the pollen dust from her vocal chords, she let the frustration which had been building let loose. If she was going down, she wasn't going down in flames, but in fireworks.   
  
"JUST WHAT THE HOLY HELL IS GOING ON HERE?!"  
  
That felt just plain good. Before, she'd been reserved about cursing in a church, but no longer. Vicious was dead, gone to hell, the chapel with him. This building was nothing but a desecrated temple—who would worship here but Vicious to his fallen angels?   
  
Her shouting hadn't fazed the two odd ones so she went on, her eyes remaining on the man holding the gun—obvious rule: never take your eyes off your enemy, your lover, your friend, and the one that knows your secrets…   
  
Never take your eyes off a killer.  
  
"You're hired to shoot me?" she queried the obvious, and Dismer smiled. "Well fine, at least tell me what the hell it is you guys are going on about before you do—Hey you!" she switched the direction of her interrogation to the girl, still shouting because it felt so damn right. "You need me, he said? You saved me—why?"  
  
Margaret, who had the luxury of being able to look away from Dismer, turned her gaze on Faye, pushing the red lenses back over her eyes.   
  
"And who's the other target?" Faye went on. Now that the questions had started, they wouldn't stop rolling off her tongue as she began to process things. The two of them, Dismer and Margaret—two people she'd just met and hadn't had a regular talk with—obviously knew something about her that she wasn't aware of. "Just what did I do exactly? What did I do to piss off your employer?" She would have liked to look the girl in the face, but that wasn't a current option. "And kid—who the hell are you?"  
  
Dismer chuckled. "Wow, you talk a lot," he smiled a different sort of smile, and Faye almost choked on a mouthful of the rising spores as she realized where she'd seen the look before—almost—and it seemed so long ago.   
  
Spike—  
  
She'd been tied to the pillar, gun pressed to her head and Spike's gun aiming just over her shoulder at the man who's face she never saw before the bullet hit it.   
  
And in his eyes…nothing.  
  
And in his smile….had he smiled? Or had he just gone into that emotion-filled void without expression? Or perhaps it was expression without emotion… Somehow, she couldn't remember, but the casualness with which he'd been so brutal…  
  
That explained it. That explained why she hadn't been afraid when the assassin pointed his pistol at her head. Dismer had an air of casual violence but he could never be a Vicious. He could never be a Spike.   
  
And even if he did kill her on the spot, he could never be frightening.   
  
Spike terrified her. He consoled her. He made her happy and infuriated and sometimes if not usually both at the same time.   
  
But he could be so cruel so easily, and so nice just as well—he was so casual about it, Faye had to wonder, did that man really give a damn or was he belting out words at the appropriate or inappropriate time?  
  
Spike always said he didn't care. Didn't care about the damages he caused, or the people put at risk when he went out on a hunt.   
  
Didn't care, and yet when it could be done, Spike had forced the happy ending; his final failure hadn't been fair.   
  
He'd always taken in the universe with such a quiet understanding that Faye had thought his avoidance of consequences was just bullshit.   
  
She'd come to expect him to wave conflict aside so easily, but waving herself and Jet aside just as simply…she hadn't expected that…  
  
When he'd left, she hadn't expected it to happen the way it had, and yet she'd felt no shock… why?  
  
The child's voice brought her back to reality, and Faye realized she was still staring into the gun barrel, it's opening the void which had hypnotized her into thoughts of the Lunkhead.  
  
"You said it yourself," Margaret bit out suddenly, barking at Dismer without regard to Faye's questions. "You won't kill me. So if you shoot her, I'll stab you."  
  
The assassin laughed, and this time it actually sounded as if he found something funny. "You'll stab me? Marg!" that smile widened to show a row of white, straight teeth. "We both know that the direct approach isn't your style. Not like that, no, you wouldn't kill me that way." He tapped his glasses with his forefinger.   
  
And this time it was the girl who smiled. "Maybe I wouldn't," she said coolly, then jerked her head once in a gesture towards the doorway. "But I bet ~he~ would."  
  
Faye couldn't help it. She broke the eye contact from Dismer and his gun and looked towards where the room's attention lay—the center of the underworld's universe coming home to where he was worshiped and exiled…   
  
"Spike!" Faye exclaimed. She knew she should have sounded relieved to see him, but instead she sounded as if he'd caught her by surprise while she was doing something wrong. Hand in the cookie jar, ace fallen from her sleeve, trespassing on his property.   
  
And there he was, leaning casually against the doorframe and smirking so much better than the assassin could. Arm outstretched, his Jericho pointed at Faye's attacker, the gun looking like a natural part of his hand…   
  
It was part of it, Faye decided. If Spike were to have objects instead of hands there would be a gun attached to one arm and a cigarette on the other.   
  
His eyes flicked to Faye for an instant, then to Dismer before taking the room in in its entirety—and absorbing it completely, all eyes on him as if the man were everything.   
  
Her previous thoughts returned to her, and Faye didn't know what to think for a moment. For a moment she wanted to throw her arms around him, for a moment she wanted to run away, for a moment she wanted to hide behind him and let him protect her, for a moment she wanted to tell him to mind his own damn business, for a moment she wanted to thank him for coming back—or slap him for leaving in the first place.  
  
She wanted to beg him to come back.  
  
She wanted to banish him forever.  
  
She wanted him to speak, and he did.   
  
"Women," he mused aloud, but not sounding angry although Faye knew he very well might be. The smile was there, and in his eyes… "Nothing but trouble."  
  
~~~  
  
Finding one person on Ganymede actually isn't as hard as some might think. Jet knew his target, Yolan Davis, would be planting poppies somewhere and that made things pretty easy.   
  
Along with the weather projections (more like weather previews, actually, for climate control hardly ever broke down) most news stations would report the air quality, and when Jet saw that the allergy alert was quite abnormally high for the Trivera district, obviously two plus two equaled poppies.  
  
And he was right.   
  
An hour and a half after landing, Jet Black had his bounty cornered in an alleyway, hands straight up in the air, and begging for sympathy.  
  
"You don't understand!" Yolan cried. He held a switchblade in his shaking right hand, but other than that, he didn't appear threatening at all. In fact, he was a blubbering child of a man, whose breakdown attitude completely betrayed his appearance of a guy nearly as muscular as Jet, and just as tall. "You have to let me go—one more city—I'll turn myself in!"  
  
Jet found himself rolling his eyes. Sure, some bounties were whiny, but most weren't too pathetic. "Sorry fella, that's the way it goes," Jet told him, examining the bounty with a critical eye. "You sure don't seem like the serial killer type…"  
  
Yolan froze, eyes still large, and gave a kind of goldfish expression. "Serial…But I didn't…" he started, then made a grab for his bright red hair with the hand that didn't hold the knife. "Oh God! Now I'm being blamed for him! Figures…I probably deserve it…"  
  
Jet blinked. Now Mr. Davis was talking to himself. Jet wasn't used to being ignored by bounties, and he began to wonder if he should just run up and cuff the man, except with crazy people it was usually best to wait until they were subdued. Who knew when Yolan would remember he had a knife.  
  
"God, oh God," the bounty continued to murmur, pacing back and fourth in what cramped space the alley had to offer. Shaking hands reached into the frayed jacket pocket, and Jet was ready to jump aside should a gun appear, but Yolan produced a crude roll of some drug or another instead.   
  
The bounty hunter stood forgotten for the moment as Davis stuck the paper between his lips, absently rubbing a match against his coat as if that would cause a spark, all the whole muttering to somebody who wasn't there.   
  
"I tried, Ben, I really tried. It wasn't my fault, I was only trying to do something for her and it got twisted around…"  
  
Jet shifted in both discomfort and impatience. If only that man would stop jerking around so much, he could shoot the knife out of his hand and get this over with.   
  
"They're gonna arrest me, Ben, whatdoIdo?"   
  
They? Jet's eyebrows furrowed and lifted. Last time he checked, he was one person.   
  
"I've got one left but they're gonna arrest me, Ben! You shouldn't have trusted me with her, I don't know what to do, he turned her into a monster, Ben, Marg's not your little sister anymore…"  
  
"Marg?" Jet repeated, suddenly remembering that the girl had told him to mention her name.  
  
The match Yolan had attempted to light finally snapped in half, and he quieted for a second or two to stare forlornly at the thing before allowing it to fall to the ground and join the rest of the litter. And as if that was all it had taken, he looked up at Jet with a morbid expression.  
  
"Did you say something?" he asked, turning his head to the side and looking inquisitive, attempting to figure out Jet's presence and his own in the alley.  
  
"Your friend Margaret," said Jet, holding his hands up to put the man at ease, but still keeping a finger on the trigger. "She's worried about you. Asked me to turn you in so you'd be protected in prison."  
  
Yolan returned the statement with a sleepy stare, turning his head to the other side. "When…did you see her?"  
  
"I gave her a lift to earth the other day," Jet explained, then repeated for emphasis, "She asked me to find you."  
  
His bounty blinked in slow motion. "A lift…" he echoed in a mumble before his eyes widened, irises quickly becoming a spot framed by white. "You—you're from the Bebop?"  
  
Jet started—this guy knew who he was? Perhaps Margaret had called him from the ship. "That's—"   
  
"Faye Valentine's ship?" Yolan demanded, voice loud, eyes large, frozen enough to cease the trembling. "You're a friend of Faye Valentine?"  
  
"Er—yes?" Jet tried to blink away his confusion, which of course didn't work. "How did—"  
  
"I DIDN'T KILL HER—I SWEAR I DIDN'T KILL HER!" Yolan shouted. He threw the switchblade on the ground, and it landed with the handle sticking straight up in the air.   
  
The poor man's breath sounded rushed, ready to hypervenolate. "Don't shoot me, please! I know you must want revenge but—" he fell to his knees in front but out of arms reach of Jet.   
  
"I didn't do it, you gotta believe me."  
  
Jet tried blinking again. Nope, still nothing. Running a hand through imaginary hair, he missed his bonsai already. He hadn't expected anything like this at all.   
  
~*~*~  
  
Everyone in the room could tell Dismer's options were limited. His gun was still aimed at Faye, and he had the choices of a) shooting Faye and getting shot by Spike, or b) shooting Spike and getting stabbed by Margaret—not a fatal wound of course, but he wasn't too keen on stabbing in general, and that would probably give Miss Valentine enough time to grab her own gun and shoot him.   
  
Incidentally, he chose option c. He lifted his hands in mock-surrender, smiled, threw Miss Valentine a wink and after an "I'll see you soon", jumped out the circular hole that was once the stain glass window.   
  
Spike had fired two shots, both missing, before the assassin disappeared over the ledge, however he didn't move to the window to try shooting as the man escaped. Spike shrugged, looked from Faye to Margaret holding the katana to Faye again.   
  
"Women," he said again with a shake of his head as he holstered his gun. "That the guy who was after you?" he asked Faye.   
  
"No," Faye replied with an overstated eye roll. "That was President Nixon."  
  
Spike gave her a blank stare. "Who?"  
  
"Never mind."  
  
She'd already picked up her gun, which she'd dropped when caught by surprise, and was heading to the door. The Nixon thing had been the best attempt her frazzled mind could come up with to lighten up the mood, but of course that kind of crap could never hold water, and all she wanted was to get out.  
  
But too late. Behind her came the unceremonial clang of the katana hitting the ground, a metallic hum hovering in the air for a second or two as both Faye and Spike immediately turned to face the source of the sound.   
  
The sword lay at the feet of Margaret, who was brushing the flakes of dried blood left over from the hilt off her palms. When she felt eyes on her, she looked up from her hands at the two adults, then down at the sword and up again. "Sorry," she muttered.  
  
Faye, with a variety of anxious feelings twisting at her intestines, watched Spike's eyes as they ran over the katana, the blood, then trailed at an agonizingly slow pace to the dark stain on the rotted wood, and came to rest on the decaying body of Vicious.  
  
He stared, silently, stoned-faced, eyes obviously seeing something invisible to normal people. It seemed he might stare forever, and Faye wouldn't put it past his abilities. Vaguely, she wondered if she was the only one who could feel the tension. The way Spike watched the body, as if any second now it might spring back to life, created some awful feeling of anticipation inside her, and in the silence she waited for what might happen next.  
  
But as one silent second dragged on after another, Spike's position unchanged—the same way he watched the Bebop's ceiling fan, but more intense—Faye felt about ready to scream. It sort of felt like somebody had fired a gun at her, but instead of watching the bullet hit, she had to watch it travel towards her forever and ever.   
  
Never hitting, but always about to, waiting in sick anticipation…  
  
This had to end, she needed to get out. Faye opened her mouth to say his name, but inhaled too sharply, and only got out the "Sp—" before a choking fit of coughs overcame her. The forceful coughing it took to liberate her airway made her stomach double up, and she fell against the doorframe for support, and tried to focusing on keeping her lungs inside of her body.   
  
The one silver lining was that she'd succeeded in breaking Spike's trance. Faye's eyes were watering now from the pollen irritation, but they caught the blurred, bluish image of him next to her.   
  
"What's wrong with you, are you chocking on something?" he asked, giving her back a couple pats that were more harmful than helpful as they pushed the air she'd fought so hard for out of her lungs too quickly.  
  
The glimmering spores in the air continued to cling to her, and those that didn't floated up in a shining train towards the moon-image in the Martian sky. Spike was finally starting to catch on that it was the flowers to blame for Faye's current condition, and she felt an arm sling across her back and hook onto her, pulling her into a standing position.   
  
"Hurry up, come on," Spike urged her as they went down the stairs. "Before you have the mother of all asthma attacks."   
  
Faye really didn't need that much encouragement. Just the thought of getting out of that chapel was enough to spur her on. Her watering eyes made the downstairs chamber a rush of yellow before she felt the crisp morning air around her. She fell onto the cool pavement in the courtyard and focused on breathing, yet basked in what relief she could feel.   
  
She didn't see Spike's rather annoyed/confused stare, but she felt his hands brushing down her arms and shoulders roughly. "It's not coming off," Spike said, maybe to her, maybe just a general observation, she didn't know. "Puffs into the air, then clings right back to you."   
  
Rubbing the crocodile tears from her eyes, Faye watched as he swiped his hand against the sleeve of her jacket. Sure enough, a thin, smoky cloud of spores flew into the air, before flying back down to catch on her skin once more. Some were illuminated, leaving her with a kind of glow.   
  
Looking Spike up and down, she saw he was just fine and not sharing in her flower-power-problem in the least bit. Faye turned her attention to her sides when she heard sounds and found Ed and Ein, flanking her right and left, sniffing.  
  
"Faye-Faye smells funny," Edward announced, helpfully stating the obvious. "And she's all lighted-plighted-smited uuuup!"  
  
"Ed, now is not the time," said Spike. If Faye had been a malfunctioning machine, he'd have kicked her by now, having run out of other visible options. He reached out a hand and ruffed her hair, upsetting her headband and earning a noise of protest. Spike watched as the pollen flew out and then back into the purple strands, and was rather at a loss for ideas. "Did we ever buy a lint brush for Ein?"  
  
Faye shot him a glare, then sneezed. Spike smirked in response, before continuing his observations. "It's not just your clothes, but your skin and hair—jeez, Faye, what did you fall into? You're like a damn magnet for this cra---AAAGGH!!"  
  
All at once the group found themselves rather cold and especially wet.   
  
"What the hell?!" Faye managed to croak out, looking over to see Margaret standing a few feet away holding a garden hose.   
  
"Edward is sooooaaaaaked!"  
  
Margaret gave Ed a quick glance before answering Faye with a gesture to the hose. "The pollen won't stick now," she explained. "But that's a temporary solution."  
  
"Edward and Ein-doggy are cold!"  
  
Spike grimaced as he shook his hands, flinging water all over, which Ein retaliated by shaking himself until Spike was more wet than before. "I hate pets," he growled, eyeing the kid and the proud woman just as suspiciously. His life had been taken over, and there wasn't much getting out of it. Defeated, he sighed and asked, "Well? What's the permanent solution?"  
  
"Well…" she replied, twisting the nozzle to stop the flow of water. "You could leave the planet. The projection can't reach farther than the planet's gravity."  
  
"Projection?" Faye repeated, her voice mostly returned. "What pro—wait a minute," she followed the glowing trail of spores up into the sky as she remembered the pollen's appearance coinciding with the moon's. "It's the flowers that are making that appear?!" she asked, eyes on the sliver orb in the sky. Mars's two actual moons had disappeared in the dawn, leaving the foreign doppelganger to hover over them on its own.   
  
"Focus, Faye," Spike ordered. He had his jacket off now, and was wringing it out over a very disgruntled corgi, before jumping away from the return volley of water. "Don't you see the bigger problem?"  
  
"Oh?" Faye lifted an eyebrow. "Bigger problem, and what would that be? Well I know there's an assassin after me for some reason I have no clue about, and even if I managed to kill him before he kills me if I don't find out who hired him then the assassins will keep coming. I was almost shot today, then choked by ~flowers~ that are going out of their way to ~attack~ me, I'm soaking wet and cold but if I try to dry off I'll be in the middle of some kinda allgeryfest, all of this defying every law of science—  
  
Tell me, Lunkhead, WHAT'S THE BIGGER PROBLEM!?"   
  
Spike was now trying to light a dripping cigarette, and he answered her still frowning at his lack of success. "You're ship's broken, you can't get off the planet."  
  
Faye's eyes widened and the curses rolled off her tongue of their own accord. He was right, the Redtail could never make another run even if she managed to get it out of impound. That thing would take weeks to repair, and she didn't have the option of hanging around on Mars for that long.   
  
"Your ship—"  
  
"Impounded too. Not only did I leave the Swordfish unsupervised for days, but I landed it in a no parking zone," Spike interrupted, frowning at the ruined pack of smokes and tossing them on the ground for Ed to sniff at. "In fact, that baby has a surprising amount of tickets on it. I've been catching some local bounties, but I still need a bit more to foot the bill."  
  
"Great," Faye tried to rub her headache away with her fingertips to her temples. No luck. "Juuuuust great."  
  
"So I can assume you don't have the money to rent a ship? Cause I don't so don't bother asking."  
  
She shook her head and made a face, and Spike laughed a little, causing Faye to shake her head even harder so her drenched hair would fling water at his smartass face. Sending her another smirk, he turned back to Margaret.   
  
"Any other options?"  
  
"Sure," she shrugged, crossing her arms. "Get rid of the source. Burn down the building, poppies with it."   
  
Ed had been trying to rub the water out of her wild hair, which now looked like a dripping mop across her face. Parting the normally nonexistent bangs away from her eyes, she exchanged a look with Ein. "Nya?" she asked, for Spike-person and Faye-Faye had gotten quiet all of a sudden.   
  
~*~*~*~  
  
Jet wasn't having a nice day, so he swore the hopeful, happy-face branded message on the takeout bag was mocking him. He'd hoped that Davis would calm down in a more comforting environment, i.e. while eating, and would then be in some state of mind to give explanations.   
  
Normally he'd never treat a bounty to a meal, but this was a special exception because Yolan had information Jet wanted and seemed far too out-of-it to bargain the good old fashioned way: with money.   
  
"Now I don't blame you for Faye's—er--murder," Jet assured him in a patient voice. "But I need you to tell me who I should blame."  
  
Really, he felt at a crossroads. On one hand, Yolan Davis was obviously unstable, and therefore any information he gave was subject to question. On the other hand, he hadn't heard from Faye in a while…  
  
Jet was holding back an amount of worry large enough to surprise him. There had been a few unspoken rules on the Bebop concerning specific female crewmembers and bounties, that rule being: only turn your friends over to the ISSP in an absolute emergency and only if the sentence is less than six months. Under that line of closure, Poker Alice and Radical Edward had nested on his ship, and the times Jet had actually considered handing them over to the authorities were amazingly few and far between.   
  
  
  
Still, if Faye had gotten herself into another mess, well, that wasn't his problem. But if somebody had actually killed her, than he'd want to know and he was going to get pissed.  
  
"All I did was plant the poppies," Yolan pouted, working his chopsticks in the air. "He did everything else. I wouldn't've helped you see, but they took Marg hostage…"  
  
"Okay, okay," Jet interrupted, holding up his hands. "You've skipped over my question, now tell me who the 'he' and the 'they' are and—"  
  
"And you won't turn me in?"   
  
"And I won't kick your ass before turning you in."  
  
Yolan looked to his egg roll for sympathy, but found none. "I'd probably deserve it…" he muttered, and Jet laid a frustrated hand on his forehead in an attempt to make the headache leave. Perfect. How was he supposed to threaten a guy if the guy was asking for punishment?  
  
"Now look," started Jet, allowing the force in his voice to its welcome return. "I could just shoot you right here—"  
  
"Wait I've got a name!"   
  
Jet smiled. Masochist maybe, but Yolan feared death as much as the next nonSpike guy.   
  
"Well? What is it?"  
  
With a kind of sad, puppy-like noise, the man scrunched in his seat and poked at the eggroll again. "The 'he' referred to a man named Dismer," said Yolan. "And the 'they' is Dismer and that man who has the key to Marg's collar—you saw the collar, didn't you?"  
  
Jet nodded. "Key?"  
  
"It'll detach itself from her skin if this special kind of metal bar is inserted into one of the ports…I don't know really, I'm just repeating what he—Dismer—told me."  
  
Jet nodded again. "Why did that man—do you have his name?"  
  
Yolan shook his head. "I don't know his name and he put the collar on her because she's collateral—so I'll plant the poppies."  
  
"So killing Faye has something to do with Opium?" Jet asked, frankly confused as to what one had to do with the other, seeing as the woman was neither a buyer, seller, nor addict of the stuff.  
  
"NO NO NO!" Jet quickly jerked aside to avoid the chopsticks as they flew through the air, let loose as the jerky bounty pounded his fist against the table with each utterance of the same word. "This has nothing to do with Opium—it's—it's…."  
  
Almost at once some sort of clarity shone in Yolan's glazed eyes as if he were seeing a light somewhere out of the room. "I just thought of something."  
  
One eyebrow went up, and Jet gave a "What?" said in a gruff voice working hard at controlling his patience.   
  
"You're a bounty hunter," the man pointed out. "You can't get money for me unless I'm alive."  
  
Great. The bounty had just grown some new brain cells, that was bound to make things easier.  
  
"What's your point?"  
  
Mr. Davis smiled, or at least tried to. "If you want the information—then—then--," he certainly was new at this whole blackmail thing, "then you can't turn me in."  
  
Jet, with a bored expression, held up his gun. "Do you really think you can get away?" he asked. "There are other bounties I could catch, worth more than you, and you're not on my good side right now, Yolan."  
  
The shade of panic returned before hiding back under that severely fractured confidence. "Then you have to do me a favor."  
  
Jet glared at him with steely eyes for as long as it took the sheen of sweat to cover his prey's forehead and begin to bead. Then he asked, voice low, "Did you see the murder?"  
  
"What?"  
  
"Faye's murder," Jet repeated slowly with that stern expression he saved for the most serious of occasions. "Did you see it? Do you know for sure if it was this Dismer that killed her—they who, and the where and the why. I want to hear a motive."  
  
Yolan's jaw worked around his choice of word for a moment, before coming up with the same old thing that didn't give Jet nearly enough options.   
  
"About that favor…"  
  
~*~*~*~  
  
"Hey Lunkhead!" Faye's call, combined with a small collision to his head, snapped Spike out of his daze. He looked down to see the new pack of cigarettes Faye had tossed at him, and as he rose from picking it up, he saw her taking a stick out of her own new pack, same brand he usually used.   
  
"Since when do you smoke these?" he asked absently as he opened the pack and placed a cigarette in his mouth.   
  
"I've taken yours before, brand doesn't make a difference to me," she replied. He heard the sound of her lighter igniting as she lit the cigarette between her lips. Stepping next to him, she held up the flame with a limp wrist and without looking. He accepted the light, and they stood in silence for some serene moments, feeding their addiction.  
  
Spike's own lighter lay at the bottom of his inside jacket pocket, rendered useless for the moment out of necessity. There hadn't really been any way around it—well actually, they could've carjacked (well, shipjacked) somebody's zipcraft and have gotten off world, but that was too complicated. Or Faye could stay in a swimming pool or a bathtub somewhere until Jet could pick her up, but that would condemn him to a never-ending torrent of complaints.   
  
Or he could've just let her choke on the damn pollen-things, but although he'd already threatened her with it more than once, he'd never actually do that.  
  
So Spike had emptied out nearly all the lighter fluid onto a drier patch of poppies, leaving just enough fuel to spark the fire. And in less than ten minutes, the church was ablaze, the wooden floors and panels crumbling inside the frame of stones now turning soot-black.   
  
When the girl had made the suggestion to burn the building, Faye had honestly expected Spike to magically come up with some alternate plan nobody else would've thought of. But he didn't. Whatever she'd expected him to do, she hadn't expected him to walk right up to the building and play arsonist to his own past, without a word not counting a tired, almost bored sigh.   
  
But when the embers sparked to life and the flames began to dance, he'd stood still and watched. Transfixed. Like those times he'd stared out the Bebop's windows watching the black expanse of space, looking like a statue, eyes off somewhere…perhaps on Julia, perhaps just checking to see if his personal star still hung somewhere.  
  
The dawn light and the orange fire cast on him from opposite directions, illuminating them all in a nearly paranormal glow as Spike stared into shadows, and Faye felt that nervousness she remembered when the man had forced her to stare into that dead eye of his and see nothing.   
  
Something inside her, probably the maternal instinct which so far had only served to tolerate Ed, wanted to wrap an arm around him, or at least pat his shoulder in a non-boyish way, but that was no option.   
  
So she watched him watch the blaze and wondered if he saw in the flames the cremation of his past, and maybe of himself. Not all of Spike seemed to have returned from the dead, and Faye couldn't help but look at the holocaust before her and wonder if that missing piece was burning away, or if the fire would set it free.   
  
Wasn't freedom all he'd wanted?   
  
She felt too sick to ask or answer that question. Dripping wet, she headed down the street to the 24hr mini-mart to pick up some smokes, and when she came back he was still staring…  
  
Spike hadn't noticed Faye's absence until that smack in the head, which although an annoyance, had produced the cancer fruit he'd been craving. A bit of relaxation; all he could hope for at the moment, but his stomach muscles—covered in ragged pink scars still in mid-healing—refused to unclench and only then did he realize just how hungry and not-hungry he felt.   
  
Faye stood next to him, watching the chapel fall in ashes, until her cigarette was finished. Spike heard the clap of her boot heel stamping out the butt, and felt her eyes examining him for a moment before she turned around, quietly mentioning something about finding Ed and interrogating that other girl.   
  
In his mind he laughed, but it only showed up on his face as the same cynical smile. Faye, he could tell, was trying to be nice. She tiptoed around him as if he were glass, ready to shatter should his past be mentioned. He could feel her pity and unease, and he'd be dammed if he'd be outdone by a woman deserving far more pity than he'd ever give, or than she needed.  
  
Time to go. Later, he'd check to make sure Mao's, Shin's, Lin's and Julia's graves in the next-door cemetery were all right, but for now it was time to go.   
  
When he turned around he saw Faye sitting on the ground a ways away, Ed leaning against her sound asleep. She'd lit another cigarette and she smoked it with her eyes closed and extreme relief evident in her features. The firelight played across her body as if it, like every other man, liked it there, and Spike felt himself struck by the irony that their personal lives had intertwined yet again.  
  
He'd always been more open to share things with Jet, but it was Faye who'd unlocked his skeletons without even trying. Mao's death had been bait for Spike, but Faye had been the one to become bait in Vicious's plans for a showdown. And then later that woman had ended up in the care of the same man Julia had found a year prior on Callisto. And even now…  
  
That man had come after Faye, luring her in and throwing her down in Spike's graveyard. Now, she sat there trying to smoke it all away. He took out another cigarette in agreement with her methods. Yes, time to go.   
  
"I don't suppose you thought to pick me up another lighter when you bought these," he said as he walked over to her. She gave a startled little jump which shook Ed awake.   
  
"Nyaaa.." the girl purred, stretching and blinking. "Ed is tired, is Spike-person finished?"  
  
Faye gave the child an icy glare of warning, which wasn't understood, but Spike shrugged and replied, "Not until I get a light," and for the second time that morning something hit him in the head.   
  
That Margaret girl with the sunglasses (which gave off an eerie glare from the fire) had tossed a small, plastic disposable lighter at him. "I don't think it's got much life left, I found it on the street," she said as Spike succeeded in creating a flame after four tries.  
  
He shrugged again. "That's that," he turned to Faye who was standing up and brushing the Ash and pollen from her clothes. The spores were now fading and although they tried to cling to her, they eventually floated to the ground. "Hotel's on 6th, you better shower, that stuff smells weird."  
  
Faye glowered at him, attempting to mask a grin. "Thanks a lot, a lady always likes to hear that she smells weird."  
  
"Who's a lady?"  
  
"Lunkhead! You better pay for those cigarettes!"  
  
He smirked at her outburst; same old Faye. It was then that the sirens from the fire engines could be heard, coming out from the man roads and growing steadily closer.   
  
  
  
Time to go.  
  
TBC…  
  
FINALLY! This took me so long, but it's a big chappie which I hope will compensate for it's severe lateness—and I also hope it will compensate for the time it will take to get up the next chapter. I'm going out of town (actually out of country) for vacation and so this story won't be updated until august : ( HOWEVER, if you are a fan of my other CB fanfic, The Greatest Gatsby, that story will have one more chap up before I go on vaca  
  
So through with the apologies and self promotion—now for notes about this chapter!  
  
You're probably starting to notice that there are two points of focus in this story. Point 1 is the interaction between Spike and Faye which will end up closer although I'm trying to keep at a reasonable pace (reasonable being not too fast but not so slow you go, 'screw this' and read something else instead)  
  
Hey! Pointless fact, on average CB fanfics have central romance scenes either around chapter 6 or 10 ( I don't know why, it's just pointless).  
  
The other focus is of course the more action/intrigue/wtf?/plot-involved portion of this tale. I know it all seems pretty weird, but I like that. I detest predictable stories and a garuntee you that none of you can guess the ending to this (mainly because I haven't dropped any hints that go farther than mid-story yet, hehe).   
  
At any rate, these two focuses will inevitably collide at times that may or may not support the sanity level or the characters (but hey, that's what makes it fun) so I hope that's sufficient grounds to forgive the annoyance of original characters Margaret and Yolan (Dismer is of course forgivable because he's the bad guy, and most stories need one).   
  
The reason that this fic needs more characters is because if I didn't have them the story would be going plot then angst, plot then angst, whereas with the extras I can have plot and angst at the same time—look! No hands! Hehehe  
  
Anywho… I'd really appreciate reviews, because if I didn't want reviews I could post my fanfics somewhere else that doesn't have a reviewing system, and although I have nothing against that I still crave feedback the same as any author.   
  
Until next time! 


	6. age before beauty, calm before storm

I don't own. You don't sue.  
  
Forgive the grammar monster, your author has college applications to fill out and they are far more important than the correct spelling of…well…whatever…  
  
At any rate, sorry for the delay, here ya go!  
  
6 Age before Beauty, Calm before Storm  
  
Faye was frowning as she stepped inside Spike's hotel room. He'd left the television on, junk food wrappers littered the ground in nearly as many places as empty cigarette packs and cans of beer or soda. She nearly winced when she saw the bed sheets, crumpled up in a chair next to a trench coat full of bullet holes, both covered in dry blood. Clearly, he hadn't let the maid come in for a while, if at all.  
  
"Ugh, boys," she shook her head and made a beeline for the bathroom, hoping enough complimentary soaps had survived the Wrath of Spiegel so she could clean off.   
  
"What?" Spike asked, looking around the room. "It's not that bad."  
  
"It's a sty!" Faye shouted, voice a tad distorted by the bathroom door. "What did you do before Jet, lie around in your own shit?"  
  
Flopping down on the bare mattress, Spike punched the remote extra hard and turned off whatever random sitcom had been playing. "Well forgive me if I had better things to do than clean the past few weeks," he called back. Better things such as recuperating, and catching enough bounties to stay fed plus the cash needed for the Swordfish II, and trying not to think too much—and of course the more he tried the more he failed.   
  
"And you're not the cleanest woman yourself," he reminded her. Sure she was clean in body, when not covered in flower-whatsits, but he could recall plenty of long missions which had ended with the floor of the Red Tail absolutely littered in containers of dehydrated food packets, the recycled air heavy with newly discovered smells.   
  
Faye didn't bother to retort, which probably meant she hadn't heard him in the first place. The shower was running, and through the wall Spike could hear a muddled, happy sound and then, "Hot water at last!" He grinned. He'd thought those exact words the first time he'd been able to get out of bed and clean himself without further injury.   
  
~And the best part is, it's a hotel, so she can't use it all up.~  
  
"Spike-person's room smells worse than Faye-Faye," laughed Ed as she entered. Margaret was right behind her, now without her sweater for Edward had stolen it to wrap up Ein (Now a squirming red bundle in her arms) so the hotel staff wouldn't notice.   
  
"Come on," Ed called to her new friend. "Ed will teach Margie how to find a bounty-head." She unwrapped Ein and tossed him on the bed next to Spike. The dog whined and rose uncertainly on the saggy mattress, shaking the remaining water off his fur.  
  
Spike immediately shoved the mutt to the floor. "Ed that smell isn't the room, it's wet dog!"   
  
Ed took no notice of the angry bounty hunter. She and Margaret were already setting up Tomato and another computer Spike hadn't seen before. He assumed it was the new girl's, for it was a strange, antique looking thing that fit the odd appearance of the brown haired child who wore colored sunglasses indoors and a collar around her neck (that looked more like someone had stuck her head through a gear than an actual necklace).   
  
"Now Margie must watch Edward closely," ordered Ed. She began to plug different chords connecting the two computers together. Making motions for Margaret to bring her the telephone cord so she could connect.   
  
Spike raised an eyebrow and wondered if internet connection fell under the hotel's services. Oh well, what did it matter anyway? As far as he knew, the bill was still being fronted to Yolan Davis's account, so why not make good use of a free ride?   
  
  
  
"So what are you doing, Ed?" he asked, leaning back down on the bed. He needed to shower too, but knowing Faye, she'd be a while.   
  
The hacker beamed, managing to show most of the teeth in her mouth. "One Tomato, Two Tomato, Three Tomato, Four…" she chanted, giving the connecting wires some slack so that she could work on the floor without knocking the other laptop off the small table. "Two Tomatoes mean more more more bounties, faster faster faster Spikeies!"   
  
His eyebrow gave an involuntary jerk. Spikeis? He sighed, knowing not to question, and hoping that the use of two computers would in fact speed things up. He couldn't wait to get out of this place.   
  
"Just make sure you find a bounty that's nearby," he reminded Ed. The bouncing tousle of orange didn't acknowledge him, and the second child was of equal help.. "Remember, we need preferably enough to rescue my baby from the lot and still rent a ship."   
  
Like hell he was leaving without the Swordfish II.  
  
The girls seemed to be working hard. Ein had already fallen asleep, and Spike followed suit, letting the light clicks of the keyboards, the rhythm of the water against the shower doors, and Faye's faint humming lull him off.  
  
~*~*~*~  
  
Thank God Spike was a pig.   
  
If he hadn't been one, he'd have actually taken a humane number of showers, and there wouldn't have been not only one but three clean towels and nearly all of the complimentary shampoo for Faye to exploit.   
  
Gratefully, she peeled off her clothing. Her yellow flight-suit and red jacket were, like her skin, caked in dust, dried blood, poppy spores, and ash from the fire. Frowning as she held her shirt between her fingers at arms length, Faye knew there was no way she'd get back into those clothes until they were washed. The white boots would have to stay dirty, they would just take too long to dry if she washed them now, but everything else—vinyl two-piece, coat, leggings, panties, and even the suspenders—she threw onto the shower unit's tile floor to rinse off after she was done treating her skin.  
  
Faye moaned in delight when the hot water spouted out from the showerhead right away, instead of the usual five minute warm-up wait she'd become accustomed to on the Bebop.   
  
"Hot water at last!"   
  
She rubbed the scented shampoo into her hair, then onto her clothes, ringing out the fabric while she basked in the joy of soft suds running down her body and taking all that grime with them on their trip to the drain. She began to hum, softly at first, but it got louder. She didn't care if Spike overheard and insulted her again. She'd put away singing for nearly a year for that Lunkhead just so there'd be one less thing to fight about, but let him sit there and cringe is she was so off key—what's wrong with a little harmless fun? Especially since most of her other types of fun weren't so harmless.   
  
She draped her clothes over the side of the shower unit's glass doors, and dunked her head under the full blast of the spicket.   
  
Time to wash it all away.   
  
The past few weeks of hell, the waiting, wondering and finally mourning that turned out to be useless. Tip-toeing around Jet so she wouldn't get thrown off the ship as soon as his leg healed, only to have him blow up in her face anyway. The assassin, and a horrible ship malfunction for the second time above earth…seeing that replay of the moon getting too, too close…  
  
  
  
Time to make it all go away. Bury it. Drown it. Down the pipes and into the sewers where she'd never have to deal with it.   
  
She grabbed the tiny bottle of conditioner, poured a large amount into her hand and began to rub it in her dark hair roughly. Already the choking scent of the poppies was fading in favor for the lighter floral fragrances from the soaps and shampoo. Faye smiled, knowing she was killing it—killing her bad day.   
  
But it shouldn't have been a bad day, right? Spike was alive after all. She should be grateful. In fact, she'd been choking on unshed tears for what seemed like hours as she discovered she was more grateful than she'd expected herself capable of. But it was going to be all right. It had to be, it was written in the cards—or at least Faye would be sure that she made the cards say that.   
  
~~I'm Poker Alice, after all~~  
  
It would be as if he'd never left…and eventually, she'd be able to forget that he left in the first place. That was her hope, at least. Faye didn't want to think about Spike right now, he had a habit of ruining what should have been a nice shower whether it was by pounding on the door and yelling or merely invading her thoughts.   
  
Is he coming back? Is he going to stay? Is he ever going to talk about what happened?—well hell no, Faye, he won't even talk about what lead up to it all, what would make him start sharing now?  
  
Focus. Wash it all away.   
  
Her skin was red by now, almost as if a blush had crept up her entire body, but that couldn't be right. Water came from her eyes, but it was just the steam helping her sinuses—she'd been covered in pollen after all, wasn't it understandable? They weren't tears, they couldn't be.  
  
No more feelings.  
  
The water was just too hot.  
  
~*~*~*~*~   
  
Spike dreamed he was awake, however much sense that made.. His dream began before the showdown with Vicious, before he'd even known of Vicious in fact. There was no Bebop, there was no Julia, there was only Spike—all emotions present, in-tuned with reality Spike—and the drunk man next to him at the bar whose name he'd long forgotten.   
  
"Isn't it gettin' late, boy?" asked the drunk man. He wore a business suit, the tie undone, but anyone could easily tell there was muscle underneath. Spike sat quietly on the stool wearing his leather jacket, a Bruce Lee t-shirt, and ordinary faded jeans. He felt the difference of stature through his clothes, knowing that he could kick the drunk man's ass, but that would only bring trouble.   
  
"Ain't your fam'ly worried 'bout ya, boy?"  
  
Spike shook his head. "None."  
  
The man smirked and squinted. "All alone, eh?" he asked. "Too old an orphan to get some sympathy, eh? I've known it. I've known it."  
  
"That so…" Spike fed the drunk the answer he'd wanted to hear, not really caring what the guy knew.   
  
"It's so, it is…" the man trialed off in favor of looking thoughtful. "But I've got a fam'ly now, yasee… brothers. Nothing beats brothers that've got yer back, ya know."  
  
Spike continued with his silence.   
  
"That's the great thing 'bout the Dragons, see? No loner, no squatter, no men like us are worth anything unless we're worth something—see?" Drunk logic. "Working together for everyone….we all get a cut, that's what it's about, you know? Shelter, food, status, brothers—there really is something to say for brothers, in manners of respect and all….yes….that's it…. It's about when somebody messes with your friend you don't have to stand for it, you see boy? And everybody gets a cut—working towards something…   
  
What are you working towards, boy?"  
  
Spike shrugged.  
  
"That's pathetic, boy, you're wasting space if you're not doing anything and—ah! There's the man!" The drunk man swiveled his stool and stood up, nearly falling back down but obviously making an effort to look suitable for the new person who'd just entered the little drinking den.  
  
Ought of pure curiosity, Spike followed the drunk out of the corner of his eye and watched him stumble over to the entrance to meet his acquaintance, a tall, thin man with long silver-blonde hair and an expression both hostile and melancholy.   
  
"Vicious, Sir!" the drunk managed to stand at a sort of attention. "The mission was succeshful, Sir. We were celebrating over a beer."  
  
"The other's left a half hour ago," Vicious replied coolly. "I was sent to make sure you hadn't run off."  
  
"Run? No, never, no…" the man laughed, feeling the suggestion to be the funniest thing in the world. "I was giving that boy some advice, you know. Kids today haven't learned how to be productive."  
  
At the words 'that boy' Spike decided that if he was going the subject of conversation he didn't have to pretend any longer that he wasn't eavesdropping. He turned in his seat to find Vicious glancing up at him, but he turned right back to his plastered underling without acknowledging Spike.   
  
And then someone said "he's one of the usual suspects", although Spike wasn't sure who or why, but with that phrase the dream changed. It moved quickly, in a blur, pausing in places just long enough for him to catch an image here and there.  
  
Little things, some important and some not. Things like the mustache on the face of the man he'd had to spar with to prove he was Syndicate material; the chewed fingernails on the girl (a higher agent's nervous little sister, only sixteen) who carefully handed him the weapon he was to use, his Jericho; his first fight, when adrenaline overcame the panic and he found himself back to back with Vicious, realizing that the men he was working were indeed backing him up and he had found a fold….  
  
Indeed, there was nothing like brothers.  
  
Then the turning stopped, and it was months later. He and his team were shooting pool at the bar which he'd first been recruited at, and Spike was winning as usual. But then the door opened, and in stepped…  
  
Nobody?  
  
That didn't seem right. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he felt he was waiting for someone. Spike looked around and counted off the members of his team—all present, including Vicious—so if everyone was here, who had he been expecting? It was probably just the wind pushing the door open, but for some reason it bothered him like an itch he couldn't scratch.  
  
  
  
Everything which had been so right a moment ago now seemed very out of place, and Spike found that he couldn't shake the feeling that something had been overlooked. Forgetting about the game, he pulled his trench coat over his other jacket and hurried out the door, which was still open as if an invisible hand had turned the handle.  
  
He rushed down the street unsure of his direction, but knowing there was something—or someone, perhaps—that he needed to find. But slowly, unexplainably, it became harder and harder to walk. Spike wrapped an arm across his torso, finding gashes and bullet wounds bleeding freely and wincing at the pressure on what was probably a broken rib.  
  
Spike couldn't remember where those injuries had come from, but somehow he knew that the reason they were there was because the other members of his team had failed to watch his back.  
  
Every man for himself, after all.  
  
Perhaps it was the newfound sensation of bitterness that forced a sudden wave of nausea and cold chills, but it might just as easily have been the blood loss. Either way, he could no longer force another step, or hold himself up for that matter. His eyes blurred and the world tilted.   
  
He didn't know much at that point, only that he hit the ground outside of an apartment building with many lit windows. The door opened up, but the invisible hand must have been the cause once more, for there was nobody standing in the open square of light.  
  
Spike's dream had turned to darkness, but although he saw nothing he could hear a voice coming through. Singing? Humming? A soft melody with no words forced him to open his eyes to a setting he didn't recognize and knew at once was completely wrong.   
  
He lay on a funny-smelling couch, bandaged up like a mummy. One hand had fallen over the side and rested on the floor, through which he could feel the slight vibration on an engine, meaning he was on a ship.   
  
  
  
"What…?" he managed, finding his voice next to nothing.   
  
The singing stopped. "Hush up," someone ordered softly. It was a woman he'd never seen before with purple hair and little clothing. "You really took a beating; don't move."   
  
  
  
Spike made to sit up but the woman's pale hands pushed him down again before one rested against his forehead.   
  
"Got a fever too," she said. "You really need to rest."   
  
He stared at her in confusion. His reason for lying on the couch was obvious: he was injured and she'd patched him up, but that didn't explain why the concern in her voice and the slight smile on her face seemed so completely wrong.   
  
"I was supposed to meet someone…a woman…" he said, unsure of how he'd known that. "Was it you?"  
  
"It wasn't me."  
  
"Why didn't she show up? At the bar…at her apartment…where is she?"  
  
  
  
The purple haired woman removed her hand from his forehead (for which he was a bit sorry, because it had felt cool and relieving) and looked thoughtful. "She said she'll be waiting for you at the place….she said you'd understand that," answered the woman rather gravely. "You're hurt pretty bad though, the trip might kill you."  
  
But he knew that didn't matter.  
  
"How do I get there?"  
  
"You'll need to wake up first."  
  
The dream changed again as soon as Spike's head fell back onto the couch cushion. Suddenly the couch wasn't a couch at all, but a bed in a sparsely decorated apartment that he recognized.  
  
Julia, the graveyard…it was all coming back to him now.   
  
  
  
Spike leapt from the bed. His wounds were no more but his trench coat was still a tattered mess. He left it on the chair next to the bed, knowing it no longer mattered if Vicious found traces of him in Julia's apartment. A moment later, he was out the door.  
  
He didn't know what he expected to find at the old chapel. Would Julia be there, ready to run away with him? Or would she kill him like Vicious wanted her to? Perhaps she wouldn't be there at all, and it would be a Syndicate team ready to ambush him…  
  
It turned out to be none of those. When he rounded the side of the church and found the graveyard path he saw a familiar face—two of the same face actually. Shin and his brother Lin stood next to an unfilled grave, hovering over a casket.  
  
He couldn't help but look on in confusion as Lin, much to Shin's apparent distress and annoyance, began yelling at the coffin and banging on the top with the handle of his gun. Spike came forward just in time to catch "are you crazy, woman!?" before they saw him.  
  
"Spike! Thank goodness," Shin called, causing Lin to look up. "We could really use a hand with this. You'll probably have more luck than us."  
  
He stared at the polished mahogany box, a wreath of red roses resting on the lid. "What's all this?"  
  
"It's Julia," Shin explained. "She wont come out."  
  
Spike started. "Wont come…out?" he looked to the coffin once more. "Of there? What's she doing in there?"  
  
"I'd sure as hell like to know," Lin growled.   
  
Shin sighed and rubbed his forehead. "Could you give it a try, Spike? She listens to you. She's supposed to be meeting Vicious at the opera house in a couple hours and there's going to be trouble if she doesn't show." What Shin also knew, but didn't mention, was that instead of going to the opera, the plan had for her and Spike to meet at this spot so they could run away together…  
  
"I'm not going!" came the muffled voice of Julia from inside the casket. She didn't specify going with Vicious or going with Spike.   
  
"You're acting like a four year old!" snapped Lin with another whack to the lid. "How are we supposed to explain to Vicious that you'd rather lay there playing vampire than see him?"  
  
  
  
"I'm not playing vampire, I'm resting," Julia retorted. "And you're supposed to let me rest in ~peace~, can't you read the tombstone?"  
  
"She's not going to listen to you that way," Shin muttered, pushing his brother aside. He stepped forward, kneeled down, and talked into the coffin handle. "Julia please, I know you want out of the Syndicate, but this really isn't the right way to fake your own death."  
  
  
  
"That's not why I'm in here."  
  
"The why the hell ~are~ you doing this?" Spike demanded, striding forward until he was close enough to talk through the wood. He was nearly positive he could hear her sobbing inside despite the fact that her voice sounded strong. He knew he should be able to hold her and comfort her right now—she'd always turned to him for that whenever the sadness overtook her—so why was she blocking him off? Spike could understand her locking herself away to escape Vicious, but to escape him as well?  
  
"I can't tell you, Spike…" she finally replied, and this time the tears were very evident.  
  
"Why not?"  
  
"Because I haven't figured it out yet."   
  
There was silence for a long time, which was broken by Shin. "The gravediggers are here to fill up the hole, I'd better hold 'em off," he said, getting up and giving Lin's sleeve a tug as a signal to accompany him, leaving Spike and Julia alone.   
  
Alone and in a strange position as Spike sat down with his back against the coffin, lighting a cigarette. She needed time to think, fine, but couldn't she think while they were on the road? He wasn't trying to be insensitive, but windows of opportunity were few. Normally Vicious and Julia would arrive at the opera together but business had forced them to meet up at the building leaving them with the two hours it took her to "get ready for the show" to use to escape. The clock was ticking, not to mention those gravediggers looked ready to get on with their work and go home  
  
  
  
"Julia? Do you know how much more time you're going to need—or do you at least know how many hours or air you've got in there?"  
  
There was scuffling sounds from inside the coffin. "Sorry, I couldn't hear you, what did you say?"  
  
  
  
"I said, how much longer?"   
  
"Be patient, Spike-person."  
  
Spike started. "What?"  
  
"Edward said to be patient, Spike-person. Ed is almost done locating the bounty-head." And with that Spike opened his eyes to find himself back at the hotel room. Ed and the other kid were still typing away and Ein was sound asleep uncomfortably close to his face—dog breath, yeesh.  
  
"Did I hear you say you found a bounty?" asked Faye. Spike looked over as the bathroom door opened and the woman stepped out. The steam from within escaped into the main room, puffing into the air and fading as fast as the dream was from Spike's memory.  
  
~*~*~  
  
To Be Continued  
  
Okay, author's notes ahoy! Short chapter, eh? Well, at least it's short considering that, well, it's me for crying out loud and am I really known for my short chapters? Didn't think so. But I see it this way: in the long run the story will be easier to read (and update) with shorter chapters…of course my version of a short chapter is roughly 10 word doc pages so "short" is all a matter of perception…blah blah blah…   
  
Well hey, I'm sure all you out there have been in the situation where you waited months and months for an update and then got like two pages—wasn't that frustrating? I sure think it is, so be grateful for your ten pages!!  
  
But if you greedy little earthlings are still hard up for more fic, especially since this was supposed to be updated, I dunno, MONTHS ago, rest assured that I am already in progress with the next chapter so that'll be up waaaay faster than it took this update.   
  
Originally, this chapter was supposed to be twice as long, but I figured that it would be better broken into two parts and besides, you all waited long enough. But don't think that I've been slacking off all this time, no sir! I've written plenty for this fic, however apparently there's this thing where people want to read stuff in order…so even though I have the ending all nice and purty and typed out, you spoiled readers want to know what happens in the middle, bah!  
  
Heheh, did you notice how my rants on chapter length are almost as long as the actual chapter? My bad.  
  
So anywho, notes on this chappie:   
  
Not many notes to speak of because like I said it was supposed to be twice as long. This half has all the angst, so the next chapter has the action…well I think I'm planning some angst for the beginning and end, but the middle part is action. I still have to get around to Jet angst and plot (notice how he wasn't in this chapter, that made me sad. I tried to write him in but it didn't come out right, so better no Jet this chapter than poorly written Jet I say!)   
  
Okay you probably did notice that I added in a dream sequence—at least I hope you noticed, cause that was kinda a big hunk o text there. But rest assured this is not a Let's Play with Spike's Psyche sort of thing. I'm planning on one…maybe two more dreams in the course of this fic, however none of them will have anything to do with the other. The dreams will be for pure characterization, not plot points.  
  
To end with, I'm kind of disappointed with this chapter. Basically because the plotline didn't move I suppose, but I suppose I can take the plot into a quantum leap with the next installment, still, although I liked the psychology in this chapter, I'm not sure how much I like it…   
  
I would have preferred it as one big chapter, but I'm doing this breaking down thing for you! The readers! Ugh I'm such an attention whore… feed my addiction, leave me reviews… 


	7. Child in my Mind

I am so very sorry this took so long to get up. I found some problems in my outline and had to completely redo my plans for future chapters before this one could be finished accordingly. The corrections should make future updates more easy, but this is a difficult fanfic to write under a lot of circumstances for me.  
  
Anyway, you get an extra long chapter to compensate for the lag :D  
  
Please forgive typeos, I wanted to get this up right away.  
  
7: Child in my Mind  
  
"All right, where are you?" Jet growled, scanning the desert that had once been the boondocks of Los Angeles. The metropolitan area had long since sunk into the sea after fallen moon fragments gave the fault line a shove. Now all that remained of the city's suburbs was sand, with the shell of a building or freeway ramp sticking up every so often between the cacti.  
Jet hated Earth.  
  
He was looking at the large, ocean bordered plain of desert where he'd dropped off Margaret only a day or so before. She couldn't have gone far on her own, he knew. She would have to know the area pretty well to confidently ask to be left in such a place. Flying low in the Hammerhead, Jet saw no sign of any petite, dehydrated corpses so he could only assume she'd made it to the hills where a few settlements remained.  
  
California. He'd sent an angry and defensive Faye to the ex-state not long ago, and hadn't heard from her since. Now she was missing, assumed dead, and here he was flying over damn California looking for a brat that might fit the puzzle pieces together.  
  
With a heavy and annoyed sigh Jet forced his ship to the right and cursed the stupid sense of responsibility that had gotten him into this mess. For perhaps the billionth time since entering Earth's atmosphere Jet replayed the past week in his head, ending it with his last conversation with Yolan Davis:  
  
"About that favor..." The druggie said. He'd been making nervous attempts to tip the scales in his favor ever since Jet caught him.  
  
Jet rolled his eyes. "What makes you think you can ask for favors?"  
  
"I c-can tell you what you want to know, and Marg can tell you s-stuff too, she knows...knows so much..." the problem with Yolan, Jet discovered, was that he was just crazy enough to tell what he believed to be true, and just nervous enough to be ambiguous about it.  
  
"And what do you want me to do for this information— let you go?" Jet laughed. Davis had been fishing to make a deal with him for his escape all afternoon. He kept insisting he had a job to do, and would turn himself in once if was done. "That's not going to happen."  
  
"No...no I wasn't expecting it," Yolan shook his head; he'd subdued into minor reasonability. "Just... just find her—find Marg. Take care of her, while I'm in jail...don't let them get her back— call me at w-whatever prison you're sending me to, sh-show me that she's safe, and I...we--we'll tell you everything we know about Faye Valentine, a-and the other murders."  
  
...  
  
Jet grimaced at the repeating recollection. He still wasn't quite ready to believe that Faye was dead. If she knew someone was after her, it was more likely that she disappeared, for such a woman could never had avoided her creditors for so long without knowing how to make herself vanish into thin air. That was probably one of the things about Faye that actually surprised him, maybe even impressed him. Maybe.  
  
Faye Valentine didn't exactly exude subtlety. She was loud, boisterous, flashy, always quick to make a scene and the kind of woman who turns heads when she walks into a room. How did she hide? She must have gotten it down to an art by now, Jet could only guess. For if the hand was quicker than he eye, Faye was quicker than the hand.  
  
That was why he'd asked if Yolan had seen the murder. It had been bad enough, sitting in that death-quiet ship waiting for Spike. Waiting, wondering... he refused to do that again. No more ifs, just the facts. Until he came up with either a witness or body, as far as Jet was concerned, Faye was still alive. She'd vanished into the woodwork again, but like hell Jet was going to let her stay there.  
  
After all, he told himself, she still owes me money.

* * *

"So what's the bounty?" asked Faye, peering over Edward's left shoulder while Spike leaned over the right.  
  
"Marco Polo, twenty-two thousand," Spike read off Tomato's screen. "Is that really his name?"  
  
"Polo-person is a judo-sumo-pseudonym," announced Ed. She threw back her head so fast the goggles fell and hung around her neck. "Hits drug stores and mini marts. Armed robbery, four injured, none dead. Edward will look for pattern, please stand by!"  
  
Spike shrugged. "That's fine, I'm taking a shower." He cast a sidelong glance at Faye. She wore a towel around her body and another around her head. Spike momentarily wondered if she'd left him with nothing to use but the hairdryer.  
  
"What?" Faye snapped irritably as she noticed him staring.  
  
"What's the destination after we get that ship?" he asked. It had suddenly occurred to him that beyond 'get off mars', the game plan was rather sketchy.  
  
She scrunched up her face and glared at the question. "Well I've got some stuff to discuss with Yolan Davis," she announced ominously. "I've got to find out just what the hell is up with those flowers before they kill me."  
  
"Whatever," Spike shrugged. "Ed, you can get on Davis's trail after you find me that bounty."  
  
"Edward has the bounty-head right now!" replied the girl. She was still sitting on the floor, but she sat up straight so that her head was visible on the other side of the bed. She rested her chin on the mattress, while making hand motions high above her head as she explained.  
"Marco Polo emptied all his accounts from an ATM machine at Highler Mall an hour ago."  
  
"Really?" Faye's ears would have perked up like a dogs had it been possible. "How much cash is on him, then?"  
  
"Four hundred fifty thousand woolongs," Ed announced. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn't a lot, but it was more than the bounty and definitely enough to pay for their ships, although maybe not dinner afterwards.  
  
"Down girl," Spike rolled his eyes as Faye squealed in delight.  
  
"Sit on it, Spike," she snapped back. "We get the bounty off this guy, and who's to say he didn't drop his wallet in the chase?"  
  
He continued to glare at her. Faye assumed it was because he didn't like the idea, stealing is stealing and blah blah blah, but she was wrong. He was glaring because he'd actually had the same idea, but agreeing with Faye was a concept best taken with a grain of salt...or a spoon full of sugar, whatever the expression was.  
  
Spike didn't mention his thoughts, however. Instead he focused on a different part of her sentence. "Whose this we? I don't need your help for a small fry."  
  
Her eyes and cheeks flared in indignation. "Who the hell said this was your bounty? I'm the one who needs to get off planet, and it's not like I wasn't going to help out with your little Swordfish fund. I'm far more generous than you give me credit for!"  
  
"Yeah, I've seen your generosity, but I was just pointing out that your assassin's still loose," Spike replied, cool amidst her fury as always. "But by all means, get your head blown off. More cash for me—and good luck bounty hunting in a towel, by the way."  
  
Faye opened her mouth to retort, but had to shut it again as she realized her clothes were still sopping wet in the shower unit. Great, even without the assassin part, Spike was right. She couldn't go out like that, but she also couldn't admit it to Spike he'd called it properly.  
"Fine," she growled instead. "I've got to call the impound lot anyway; make sure they don't turn my ship into a cube or something."  
  
"It's so nice when you cooperate," he crooned with his twisted smile. He was almost out the door when something hard hit him right between the shoulder blades.  
  
"AND TAKE YOUR DAMN PHONE WITH YOU THIS TIME!"

* * *

Faye hadn't realized just how much she hated the back of Spike's neck until she had to stare at it all over again. Faye glared at the door for a long moment after it closed. A wet strand hair escaped her towel-turban and she blew it out of her eyes with a frustrated huff a breath before turning back to face the room.  
  
Ein lay on the bed, and yawned when her eyes passed over him. Ed was hunched over Tomato, and from the looks of her Faye knew she wouldn't be talkative until she was done with whatever the hell she was up to. When her gaze finally landed on the other girl they'd picked up, Margaret, she nearly blinked in surprise for a part of her had forgotten their newest guest.  
  
But then it all came back to her. The "showdown" with the assassin Dismer, and how this Margaret girl had interrupted the fight seeming all too familiar with the situation. This kid knew something—something about Dismer, the poppies, and probably something about the new moon as well. And of course, Margaret also seemed to know something about Faye, something she herself didn't know, and that was something nobody liked even without a touch of amnesia.  
Whatever this kid knew, Faye was gonna find out.  
  
But first things first....  
  
With another once-over of the room, she located the telephone underneath last week's newspaper on the floor beside the nightstand. Sitting down on the bed, she set the phone in her lap, lifted the receiver—  
And stared at it.  
  
Her fingers hovered dumbly over the numbered buttons as she experienced a sudden, sullen paralysis and she wondered just what the fuck she was supposed to say. She had to talk to Jet, that much she knew, and that knowledge surprised her. It surprised her enough to second guess herself, because although she didn't know what to do, some new part of her brain only recently created was telling her—-assuring her—-that Jet could make everything better.  
  
Just how the hell Jet would fix this, Faye had no idea. She didn't even have any idea what exactly needed to be fixed, only her trusty instinct that something wasn't right. She knew what she should do, yet her fingers still wouldn't press the keys. The automated operator's voice came over the earpiece—'if you'd like to make a call, please hang up and try again...'—and she set the receiver down with her fingers still over the numbers.  
  
Running her bottom lip against her top row of teeth, Faye tried to think. For the longest time, she'd played the game one way: her versus the rest of the solar system. Those were the sides: she was good, the rest were bad and deserved what she did to them. But then things had changed, and it wasn't her against the universe, it was her...and occasionally the Bebop crew against everything— and then Spike had gone off and died and everything turned back to normal. Just her again, because she didn't think she could handle that kind of a betrayal all over.  
  
But now...now it seemed like someone had drawn a new set of battle lines. Now, it felt like it was her and Jet and Ed against what Spike had put them through, and she felt suddenly defensive. The Lunkhead's leaving and coming back had sparked an array of emotions she'd never had to fight off before, and she didn't know how, so she could only believe—and more hope, than believe—that Jet did.  
  
So why, then, couldn't she dial? Pride, maybe...or just that she didn't know what to say—what could she say? 'I've got to tell you something Jet, are you sitting down?' or perhaps, 'I've got some good news....maybe' or what about 'Hey Jet, you remember Spike, don't you? The guy who ran off to get himself killed? Well it turns out, he still pretty much sucks in that department...oh and by the way, I've got a hit man on my ass.'  
  
Oh yeah, that was priceless.  
  
Faye ran through every scenario she could think of, trying to come up with an easy way to get the whole story out. In the end she decided, "Fuck this, I'm just gonna come out and say Spike's alive and let him take it from there." And she smiled. It was the perfect plan, and besides, Jet had never known her to be anything but blunt, so why should today be any different?  
  
The smile turned into a smirk. For the first time since the jarring shock of seeing the moon—no, for the first time since she'd told off Jet back at the Bebop, she felt like Faye Valentine again. She had to admit, that Valentine wasn't a woman she agreed with or even liked a lot of the time, but there was a certain strange pride that came with her persona.  
  
That was the one thing, and probably the only thing she could thank Spike for. He'd spent so much time running away from himself, all the while letting his old life grow stronger as it chased him until it nearly devoured him in the end. Faye had already decided she wouldn't be like that, not like him. She could see their similarities—he ran away, and she ran toward. Toward a past she couldn't catch, toward a life she couldn't have, toward a Faye she couldn't be.  
  
Well screw that.  
  
If she couldn't reclaim her past, then she'd better get started on her future—-especially since she had a twenty-four year late start. She was going to have to be Faye Valentine now, and if that was a woman she didn't like, well then she'd just have to change because she'd be damned if she was going to walk around hating herself.  
  
So, Faye Valentine it was. And Faye Valentine wouldn't bother with this stupid phone anyway.  
  
The smirk grew wider, and Faye found that she was finally liking the feeling of it again. There would be no more of this whining and pouting and wondering. There would be no more self-pity, no more letting herself get walked on. She wasn't going to sit around like some sailor's girl and wonder if Spike was ever coming back—it was his decision, and she was just going to give him a piece of her mind about it as soon as he got back.  
  
Another thing she wouldn't stand for was Jet's asshole attitude. She remembered what he'd been like lately, and with that memory she set the phone back on the floor and decided that Jet could figure out for himself that Spike was alive—preferably while Faye was there to witness the dead man walking into the ship and scaring the old guy out of his pink shirt.  
  
It really did feel good to smile again.  
  
"Faye-Faye?" she looked up to find Ed staring at her.  
  
"Damn it, I'm hungry," she announced, enjoying the return of her appetite along with her confidence. She remembered her last meal, a small bowl of broth from that Indian chief which had been all she could stomach at the time. "All right, I'm calling room service."  
  
"Yay! Foooood! Edward wants—AH! Uh-oooh...."  
  
"What?" startled, Faye rolled across the bed to look over the hacker's shoulder. Ed had stopped typing, her fingers rigid and spider-like over the keys and her mouth a squiggly line. "What's wrong? What?"  
  
Marco Polo's bounty profile was on the screen in a slightly minimized window, and in another window was what looked to Faye like a scanned copy of some kind of document. "What's that?"  
  
"That is Polo-lo-lo's medical file," Ed answered, pointing with a rubbery finger. "Mr. Bounty Head's got a condition. He's got hemophilia."  
  
Faye blinked at the screen, trying to see what Ed saw but all she came up with was a lot of doctor-talk and Latinlike jargon. "That means...he doesn't stop bleeding even if it's just a little scrape, right?"  
  
Ed nodded with enthusiasm. "Corectomundo, Faye-Faye! Marco-Parco's got no platelets in his plasma."  
  
"I'll take your word for it," Faye assured her. She'd already slid back across the mattress to where the phone sat on the nightstand. She had to warn Spike about this guy, else their money ticket might end up dead from a bloody nose or other Spiegelesque injuries, like bullets et cetera. She dialed quickly and—  
no connection. "Aw hell, that idiot!" she growled and slammed the receiver down with a bang and a cling. "He probably never charged the damn phone since the Bebop!" either that, or he just didn't want to answer her...frankly, Faye preferred the option that made Spike look stupid.  
  
She made a rush for the bathroom where her clothes were, but a voice stopped her. "I'll go," offered Margaret. She'd already put her large red sweater back on and was brushing the dog fur away. "I can still catch him, but you don't have time to get dressed."  
  
"Now hold on—" Faye started, but the kid slipped out the door too fast. She stood in the middle of the room and wondered if it would be worth it to give chase. That girl, whoever she was, knew a lot about her current hit man problem, so it probably wasn't too good an idea to let Margaret out of her sight. Still...back at the chapel, it sounded like Margaret had gone through a lot if effort to track her down, and therefore probably wouldn't just run off.  
  
In the end, Faye shrugged and decided that whatever the little mongrel was up to, it wouldn't do her any good to run down to the lobby in a towel. And besides, Ed seemed to trust her---more importantly, Ein seemed to trust her---so why bother babysitting?  
  
Faye jumped back on the bed, smiling as she bounced a little. This place sure had better springs that the Bebop's mattresses. She found the remote and decided that now would be as good a time as any to see what was new in Martian Hollywood. Then she remembered her lunch plans and smirked to herself—whoever had the bill on this room was gonna be in for a surprise. Still smiling, she dialed room service.

* * *

Spike hated the mall with a vengeance normally reserved for mutant lobster and low rank mafia. He wasn't exactly sure why, maybe it was just a bitter feeling from being surrounded by stores and no money for them. But then again, even if he wasn't broke, he certainly couldn't picture himself as a customer any of the mall's stores. In fact, shopping that didn't involve food was close to making fourth on Spike's hate list, right behind proud women.  
  
To make matters worse, Highler was kind of a 'yuppie' mall, as Faye might call it. A lot of brand named, expensive specialty shacks and shops for the uptown crowd too good for anything with 'mart' in its name. Grimacing and suppressing a groan, Spike resumed his usual forward lean and tried to blend into the sea of the polo-wearing posh.  
  
He was suddenly very glad he'd left the shrew back at the hotel room, since had she come along she'd probably drag him into some store and make another attempt at trashing his favorite blue suit. 'You're so out of date' she'd told him once, as if she herself was one to talk.  
  
He took a seat at one of the food courts metal tables on the second floor where he could overlook the plaza below. It was the mall's center spot, and hopefully his target would pass by sooner or later as Spike sure as hell was not going to duck into Abercrombie's 93rd anniversary sale to search for him.  
  
"Hey..." someone suddenly tapped him on the shoulder, and Spike eased his head back to find the twerp with the sunglasses in the corner of his vision. "Is your phone dead? I've got a message for you."  
  
"Make it fast, I'm busy here," he said, turning back to look over the rail again while simultaneously retrieving a cigarette from his pocket.  
  
"Yeah, I can see that," muttered Margaret. Her voice gave Spike the mental image of one thin eyebrow raised over the frame of her glasses. "Anyway, Ed found out Marco's a bleeder."  
  
"What's that mean?"  
  
"It means you can't scrape him up if you want your money," she suddenly stepped around him and sat down across the table. She leaned over so her chin went just past the rail, and stared down into the plaza. "Did you find him yet?"  
  
"Now hold it—" Spike started. His voice sounded a little higher with his added annoyance, but he kept the tone relatively level. "First of all I've been here all of fifteen seconds so no I haven't, and second of all is there something else you have to say? Cause if not, why don't you just go on back to the hotel, or wherever you're from and..."  
  
He frowned as something occurred to him. This kid had appeared out of what seemed like nowhere in the chapel ruins. His group being who they were, Spike had just assumed in the back of his mind that here was another freeloader, but he really had no idea who this girl was aside from the name Ed had given them and her antique computer.  
  
"Who the hell are you, anyway?"  
  
Margaret's head cocked to the side, her expression bland with a kind of aggressive, adolescent boredom. "I'm the hostage," she said. "Thanks for the rescue, by the way."  
  
Spike's jaw dropped a bit—when had he rescued her? He felt like he'd fallen asleep sometime during the movie of his life and completely missed a scene. "Okay kid, let's start over here..."  
  
"Do you see this guy anywhere?" she interrupted with a kind of whine. Leaving her chair, she leaned as far as she could over the railing, as if trying to see what was under the awning on the other side. "If he stays inside one or two stores, we're never gonna catch him this way."  
  
"Hold on kid--"  
  
"Margaret."  
  
"Whatever; there's no 'we' in this," Spike asserted. "I work alone—and those times when I do need a partner, I don't look for rugrats." He'd stood up straight and was trying not to just start shouting at this kid, since she wasn't paying attention at all. He was starting to get the first inklings of what he referred to as the Andy Symptom. Faye liked to call it an juvenile mood-swing, but whatever it was, it was just the way Spike tended to act around mutts, kids, shrews and poser cowboys.  
  
Spike's frown deepened. No way was he gonna baby-sit and bounty hunt at the same time, there are just certain things a Spiegel will not multitask with...unless Ed was involved, but that really didn't count as baby- sitting anyway, since the hacker was a just enough bigger help than burden.  
  
He sent the girl the worst look he could come up with, and had just started to contemplate scaring her with his gun when her arm suddenly straightened out and jutted forward. "Look! Isn't that him?" she pointed, and Spike saw with relief that she was right: Marco Polo, walking out of a kitchenware shop on the other side of the court.  
  
He jumped up at once, the table toppling over as he gave chase. The crowd around him looked over, startled at the racket. Marco Polo heard it as well, and when he looked up to see a green haired man stepping over the fast-food covered tables to get with him, he dropped his bag of silverware and ran.  
  
Spike was in immediate pursuit, following his quarry into Weston's second floor lingerie department, leaving Margaret in the food court to watch him vanish into the store. She didn't mind that though. She walked off in the opposite direction, headed for the downstairs escalator, and from there her destination: mall security. A grin formed on her lips; it came from knowing that she was finally making progress. If she played things correctly, she'd be able to watch Spike's chase on the security cameras, and maybe get some questions answered.

* * *

A half hour later, a very grumpy Spike had managed to track the elusive Marco Polo to the alley between the parking garage and the mall building. His suit was covered in food, he'd been assaulted by a mannequin display, his hair smelled like perfume samples, he'd nearly choked on a bra in that lingerie shop, and his new mission in life was to personally make sure every mall in the solar system was burned to the ground.  
  
He was too angry to even bother with softening his steps. Let Polo know he was coming, it would make him all the more defensive and give Spike even more excuses to hit him. Spike had graciously run through all the pummeling techniques he knew of that didn't involve blood, and he wanted to give this jackass at least half the list for all the trouble he'd caused.  
  
But when Spike turned the corner, the alley dead-ended, and waiting for him was a surprise. Marco Polo lay on the ground, uncommonly pale and sweat slick, but still breathing. He was unconscious, but when Spike knelt down for a closer look, he couldn't find a mark. From the skin coloring...it looked as if the man had feinted.  
  
"I got tired of waiting." Spike's head snapped up---and then down again, finally noticing the rug-rat with the sunglasses sitting against the alley wall. "Can we go now?"  
  
To Be Continued  
  
Yay for Faye's empowerment portion :) I ordinarily have a lot more to say during authors notes, but I don't have it in me at the moment. If you so doubtfully care about them that much, I'll have my thoughts on this chapter in my author's profile soon enough.  
  
Review please!


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